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Abstract
The Department of Geography at the University of Oslo has for some time been the place for cross-national and comparative research concerning structural economic change and industrialization. Attempts are being made to submit economic and industrial development in selected countries to causal analysis by means of ‘retroduction’ (as construed in a recent work by Anthony Sayer 1984): to search for factors which have compounded to produce what are conventionally described as economic growth and stagnation, a ‘tertiarization’ or ‘quaternarization’ of the labour force, public sector growth, industrialization, ‘de-industrialization’ and ‘re-industrialization’, to name some topics covered by actual and planned research. The editor of the NGT has kindly given me the opportunity to present in brief my own ‘macro-geographic’ studies in this field, to use a term which suggests their methodological resemblance to ‘macro-geography’, or ‘historical social analysis’ (Skocpol 1984). (See also the contribution of B. T. Asheim (1988) in this issue of NGT, ‘Macro-geography II: Technological change and capitalist development’.) I will therefore spend a few pages on two research projects.