A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Møller Boje Rasmussen, Martin Doctoral Thesis Is Competitiveness a Question of Being Alike?: How the United Kingdom, Germany and Denmark Came to Compete through their Knowledge Regimes from 1993 to 2007 PhD Series, No. 21.2014 Provided in Cooperation with: Copenhagen Business School (CBS) Suggested Citation: Møller Boje Rasmussen, Martin (2014) : Is Competitiveness a Question of Being Alike?: How the United Kingdom, Germany and Denmark Came to Compete through their Knowledge Regimes from 1993 to 2007, PhD Series, No. 21.2014, ISBN 9788793155435, Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Frederiksberg, http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8972 This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/208897 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. 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Is Competitiveness copenhagen business school handelshøjskolen solbjerg plads 3 dk-2000 frederiksberg danmark www.cbs.dk Is Competitiveness a Question of Being Alike? How the United Kingdom, Germany and Denmark Came to Compete through their Knowledge Regimes from 1993 to 2007 Martin Møller Boje Rasmussen PhD Series ISSN 0906-6934 21.2014 Print ISBN: 978-87-93155-42-8 Doctoral School of Organisation Online ISBN: 978-87-93155-43-5 and Management Studies PhD Series 21.2014 &$ $ ("'" $ !$$" %$" &#" 0442$ 1))3 !" # $ % $ #$ # Martin Møller Boje Rasmussen Is Competitiveness a Question of Being Alike? How the United Kingdom, Germany and Denmark Came to Compete through their Knowledge Regimes from 1993 to 2007 1st edition 2014 PhD Series 21.2014 © The Author ISSN 0906-6934 Print ISBN: 978-87-93155-42-8 Online ISBN: 978-87-93155-43-5 The Doctoral School of Organisation and Management Studies (OMS) is an interdisciplinary research environment at Copenhagen Business School for PhD students working on theoretical and empirical themes related to the organisation and management of private, public and voluntary organizations. All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. 1. PREFACE “On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, Yet this brief period when we appear in the world Is the time in which all meaningful questions arise” Paul Ricoeur, 1985 In a sense this project began almost a decade ago. In 2005 I as a young graduate philosophy student together with two fellow students initiated a small project called Thoughts Across - which for some not entirely clear reason managed to obtain funding from a major Danish Bank. With an immoderate eagerness characteristic of young students in general – and young philosophy students in particular – our self-proclaimed, bold and perhaps immodest ambition was to engender and facilitate a wider interdisciplinary scholarly dialogue between philosophers (of course!), economists, political scientists, sociologists, biologists, theologians and many others to identify “the most important trends of the 21st century”. Nothing more, nothing less. Furthermore, we decidedly wanted our participants to abstain from the conventional academic practice of hedging all claims with a battery of caveats, reservations and precautions. In short, what we wanted was a philosophical mode of reasoning attuned to the challenges of our own time – not the past. A dialogue firmly rooted in intra-disciplinary knowledge, but daring enough to move beyond and engage with, as Paul Ricoeur would have it, all the meaningful questions that arise in the brief period when we appear in the world. On the top of a long list of potential participants we put the name Ove Kaj Pedersen, who we thoroughly believed could satisfy our rather high intellectual expectations, but frankly did not expect to be willing to participate. However, ' when I called him, he – with a generosity I should later learn to be one of his hallmarks – immediately and without hesitation accepted. No precautions, no caveats, no payment – just pure reason. Thoughts Across was a tremendous success – if not exactly in terms of audience or impact – than at least according to our own unrelenting standards. Of course the project did not quite manage to break down disciplinary boundaries for good. But for just one afternoon in the spring they were briefly transcended. Not least thanks to Ove Kaj Pedersen, who in one singular session artfully discussed and connected Axel Honneth’s theory of Social Recognition, Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, N.F.S. Grundtvig’s writings, Hegel’s philosophy of Right and the emerging Competition of Nations - which he by re-phrasing Carl von Clausewitz proposed constituted “a continuation of war with other means.” Just the kind of wide-ranging, contemporarily relevant if solidly anchored reasoning the three young philosophers had been yearning for. After thoughts had been crossed, the dust settled and the remaining share of the banks funding not already spend on some remarkably expensive, but utterly ineffective billboard posters had been put to good use as stimulus of aggregate Danish demand, each went their separate ways into the 21st century. And that might just have been the end of it. However, while Thoughts Across did not accomplish very much in itself, on that afternoon I decided I wanted to work with, study under and learn from professor Ove Kaj Pedersen. Even if it meant I had to vacate my intellectual comfort zone, cross zealously guarded disciplinary dividing lines and pursue research within a scientific discipline fairly foreign to the one in which I was originally educated. Hence upon finishing my graduate studies I once again contacted Ove. And once again he immediately accepted to become my supervisor and help me draft an application for a PhD-project in what he called new institutional theory. A theory I qua being trained in philosophy had not heard of before and had to go look up. ( In fact, during my PhD-studies I have had the rare and exquisite privilege of being trained by not one but two of the – to my mind - most intelligent, innovative and original men in Denmark. Indeed the very idea for Thoughts Across stemmed from my prior employment as student researcher at the Danish think tank and journalistic weekly Monday Morning. Established by editor and CEO Erik Rasmussen quarter of a century ago, the organization to this day remains a journalistic powerhouse, unrivalled as one of Denmark’s most dynamic and dedicated political and intellectual incubators. For 25 years Monday Morning have been Danish leaders read and through a distinct form of political-economic – almost guerilla-like - journalism insisted to dig deeper than daily headlines, to connect the dots and to identify common denominators behind the ever-fluttering and frightfully forgetful stream of collective consciousness we call News. The unequivocal, impressive and inspiring result of Erik Rasmussen’s remarkable drive, dedication and truly far-sighted leadership. I first met Erik during the media frenzy of the Danish Cartoon Crisis in 2005 - which he characteristically insisted should not be understood as a risk of a Huntingtonian civilizational cataclysmic clash, but as an opportunity for renewed cross-cultural dialogue and learning. At the time I was but a very young, spiky- haired undergraduate philosophy student and very inspired by some very old (dead) thinkers, who for quite a while had not been making many headlines. Hardly prime material for a hardcore political and economic think tank. However, one afternoon I approached Erik Rasmussen. While waving enthusiastically with a quickly hand-drawn, odd-sized septagram, I suggested – literally - that the Cartoon Crisis could be understood as a clash of - not 7 civilizations - but 7 discursive interpretations of clashes, by which different actor classes and coalitions discursively contest and re-construct the crisis as a particular type of societally antagonistic dichotomous conflict, of which they themselves played an important co-constitutive part, and from which they in turn harvested social power. ) ... Monday Mornings seasoned editor-in-chief was not immediately convinced with this not entirely colloquial outcome of my