Pierre Eichenberger

University of Lausanne | UNIL · Faculty of Social and Political Sciences (SSP)

How do business actors participate in diplomatic activities? Do companies embrace national diplomatic agendas, or do they pursue atomized aims, disconnected from national contexts? In this article, we review the literature on business actors in diplomacy in search for answers to these questions. It shows that business and state diplomacy were tight...

Comparing post-WWI European societies to fortresses attacked by revolutionaries and defended by “the forces of order” Charles S. Maier wrote: “if the weakness and divisions of the attackers are well known, the strategies of social and political defense remain unexplored” (Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe, 1988: 4). This chapter investigates how em...

Entreprises, institutions, territoires Après avoir été reléguée au second plan par la popularité des approches inspirées de l’histoire culturelle, l’histoire économique et sociale suscite un intérêt renouvelé. La recherche dans ce domaine doit pourtant toujours faire face à de nombreux défis, et en particulier l’écart désormais important entre la...

Defend the Bourgeois State against Fascism : the Swiss Social-democrat Leaders after the Fall of France In May and June 1940, the German army defeated France. In just a few weeks, most of Western Europe found itself under German rule, leaving neutral Switzerland circled by Axis powers. Facing this radically new context, the Swiss political and econ...

This is a longer version of the article published in Vingtième Siècle. You will find there more references, as long as a more complete discussions of the historiography.

This article addresses the historical emergence of business cooperation. We resort to Höpner's (2007) concepts of organization and coordination in order to analyze how firms progressively engaged in Business Interest Associations (BIAs) and interlocking directorates during the first part of the 20th century. Our inquiry is based on a network analys...

This contribution serves to launch a discussion among historians interested in a transnational history of Switzerland. With the purpose of sharing information and fostering research in the field, we initiated an informal network (www.transnationalhistory.ch) and organized two workshops - one held in Zurich (March 2016) and one in Lausanne (October...

Dans cet article, nous proposons une discussion de l'historiographie relative aux organisations patronales suisses. Notre objectif est de contribuer au récent renouveau des études sur les associations patronales, dont la connaissance demeure parcellaire malgré leur importance tant politique qu'économique, particulièrement en Suisse. Pour ce faire,...

Swiss Business Interest Associations, Between Economic Coordination and Political Influence The aim of this article is to survey the historiography of Swiss Business Interest Associations (BIAs). Our objective is to contribute to the recent renewal in the research on BIAs, which, in spite of the considerable political as well as economic influence...

This article offers the first systematic study of the institutional and political conditions under which collective agreements finance and organize continuing vocational training (CVT). Combining Mill's methods of agreement and difference with pattern matching, it identifies proactive small and medium enterprises, proactive public policies, proacti...