This paper pays homage to Professor Börje Johansson’s scientific contributions in general and to the field of regional science particularly through a bibliometric approach, highlighting his publishing and citation record, co-authors and co-editors, as well as his theoretical inspirators, fellow researchers and often cited researchers.
Notes
The authors gratefully acknowledge valuable input and comments from Björn Hellqvist, Johan Klaesson, Charlotta Mellander, Peter Nijkamp, Lars Pettersson, Folke Snickars and Lars Westin, as well as from two anonymous referees.
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
1 Introduction
When Emeritus Professor Börje Johansson passed away in the Summer of 2020 just before his 75th birthday, the international regional science community lost one of its most distinguished scholars. The ultimate testimony of his contributions to this community was when in 2013 he received the EIB-ERSA (European Investment Bank-European Regional Science Association) prize in regional science.
The purpose of this paper is to pay homage to Börje Johansson’s scientific contributions in general and particularly to the field of regional science including his publishing and citation record, co-authors and co-editors through his career, and who his theoretical inspirators, fellow researchers and often cited researchers were. We apply a bibliometric approach. In an earlier paper, Karlsson et al. (2009) presented an overview of the main content and contributions of his research between 1974 and 2005, which covered 70% of his life as an active researcher. Therefore, we decided that a second overview was not justified. An alternative could have been to make interviews with colleagues, friends and family but such an approach could have resulted in an article unsuitable for publication in a regional science journal.
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2 Bibliographical footprints: a bibliometric approach for studying influence
It is notoriously difficult to analyse the influence and impact of a scholar, and this is certainly the case when trying to summarise the career of Börje Johansson. As indicated above, interviews and personal reflections about his role in the field of regional economics may give important, yet partial insights. Bibliometrics–quantitative studies of publications and their characteristics–offers another possibility to highlight the contributions of a scholar (de Bellis 2009). The advantage of bibliometrics is that it goes beyond more contextually dependent accounts of influence by providing a quantitative overview based on data provided by bibliographical databases. In our efforts to provide the most comprehensive account possible, we consulted several databases, DIVA (the Swedish publication registry), the academic search engine Google Scholar, as well as the citation dataset Web of Science. All of these provide different coverage and quality of data, which in turn allows for distinctive types of analyses. For example, DIVA does not record citations which makes this database less useful for measuring visibility and influence, while Web of Science mostly covers publications in English and does not allow for studying chapters or publications in Swedish. Moreover, bibliometrics is foremost focused on purely academic contributions whereas the structured analysis of more local and societal impact is less developed despite numerous attempts (Bornmann 2013). Bibliometrics is also limited to what has been recorded in various databases, and while many methods for measuring have been developed–more than a hundred different indicators for measuring the impact of individual scholars have been proposed (Wildgaard et al. 2014)–it still offers only a partial picture. However, a partial picture may provide potentially important insights, and quantitative overviews are useful in the sense that they may provide guidance, and inspiration for further engagement in and studies of Johansson’s works.
To make our work manageable, we have chosen a limited and partial approach in the sense that we only deal with journal articles, book chapters and editorships in English that have at least one citation in Google Scholar on the 10th of April 2022. In the national Swedish digital scientific archive (DIVA), there are in total 306 publications by Börje Johansson. A complicating factor in our work has been that there are several scientists with the name of Börje Johansson, which has made it complicated to work with Google Scholar and Web of Science. Google Scholar gives 1,100 hits for the name Börje Johansson. Thus, our bibliometric portrait of Börje Johansson is far from complete since his numerous publications in Swedish are omitted. We are aware of this limitation. Another limitation is that we have not been able to include persons who collaborated with him, in a capacity of forerunners and mentors, on finding funding for his research if this did not result in co-authored research publications.1
It is of course not possible to equate the number of citations for a published work with the quality of the research; yet citations are a useful summary statistics for analysing the visibility and influence of a scholar. Preferably, one should use data from Web of Science for analyses and evaluations of an individual researcher because of the superior quality and consistency of the bibliometric records in this data base. However, Web of Science has some clear limitations because it does not list all research publications. Indeed, Web of Science has the limitation that it only covers a distinct set of internationally oriented journals in the English language, while more nationally oriented, non-English journals are to a high extent excluded. The same is true for book chapters and books even if they are written in English (Karlsson and Hammarfelt 2019).
Based on the publications registered in DIVA and through additional searches we were able to download data from Web of Science on twenty-four articles published by Börje Johansson. This bibliometric dataset allows us to distil insights regarding co-author patterns, and key topics. It also provides an overview of the larger context of Johansson’s research by analysing the wider “co-citation” patterns, i.e. references found in papers citing Börje Johansson. It should however be noted that this dataset only covers one tenth of his overall production and it should therefore be regarded as an incomplete and partial overview.
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For this reason, we use both Web of Science and Google Scholar in this paper. Using only Web of Science would severely underestimate the extent to which Börje Johansson has influenced and inspired other researchers. This is of extra importance in the case of Börje Johansson since he has published significantly more book chapters than journal articles. In addition, he has generated a considerable number of editorships. Interestingly, as shown in Appendix A1, listing Börje Johansson’s journal articles, that there is no absolute correlation between the number of citations according to Web of Science and the number of citations according to Google Scholar. Data for analysis were downloaded on April 29th, 2022, and the analysis of co-authorships and co-citation patterns was done using the VosViewer software (Van Eck and Waltman 2017).
3 Börje Johansson’s academic career
Börje Johansson received his PhD in Economics in 1978 at the University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden for a dissertation titled “Contributions to Sequential Analysis of Oligopolistic Competition”. From 1979 to 1990 he served in sequence as acting adjunct and full professor of regional economics at the university of Umeå, Umeå, Sweden. Between 1985 and 1990, he functioned as director of Centre for Regional Science at the University of Umeå (Cerum). Before then, but concurrent with his time in Umeå, he had leave of absence 1982 to 1984 to serve as acting research leader of the Integrated Regional & Urban Development Group (RUD) at the Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria. Because of this, quite a few researchers and PhD students within the field of regional science and land use from Umeå university or with connections to the university came to spend some time at IIASA. One of these was his close colleague and friend from Gothenburg, Professor Åke E. Andersson. Together they came to establish a lasting relationship between IIASA and Umeå, a relationship that still has impact through the notion of “the C-society”, on the policies for urban development in the city Umeå.
The genuinely international environment at IIASA with researchers from the West and the East was unique during the cold war, and inspired Börje Johansson to give Cerum a strong focus on the international research arena and fostered intense exchanges with the international regional science community, e.g. through ERSA and Regional Science Association International (RSAI). The choice to orientate towards an international yardstick for what defines successful science and thus also what contributions and advice Cerum could bring to society was not made without intense discussions. Parts of the political and industrial elite of Sweden at that time argued for a more policy-related and backward-looking type of research. Instead, Börje Johansson chose to develop the international track, a path he never left.
During his years in Umeå, Börje Johansson was also adjunct professor at the university college in Karlstad, Sweden, where he and his family also lived 1984–85.2 From 1991 to 2012, Börje Johansson served first as adjunct professor and later as guest professor in infrastructure economics at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. He also held a position as professor of economics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. From 1994 to his retirement in 2013, Börje Johansson served as professor of economics at Jönköping International Business School (JIBS), Jönköping, Sweden.3 Between 2004 and 2013, he was director of the Centre for Science and Innovation Studies (Cesis). At JIBS, Börje Johansson was a member of the managerial team and served as head of the department of economics. Together with Professor Charlie Karlsson and later Professor Åke E. Andersson he was responsible for establishing and running the bachelor, master and PhD programmes in Economics as well as for the building of a research milieu with a strong focus on regional science, a research environment that the European Regional Science Association (ERSA) considered strong enough to host the ERSA congress in 2010.
Börje Johansson also provided services to the regional science community. He played a significant role in building a solid European research tradition in regional science. In addition, together with Åke E. Andersson, Folke Snickars, Charlie Karlsson, Lars Westin, Hans Westlund, Johan Klaesson, Martin Andersson and others, he was instrumental in shaping a high recognition of Swedish regional science. One important aspect that we would like to stress here is Börje Johansson’s large co-operation network in Sweden as well as abroad as illustrated below. His mind was strongly oriented towards co-operation and had the unique capacity that he could engage in productive co-operation with other scientists with all types of background. This characteristic of Börje Johansson is closely related to another characteristic of his, namely that he was what could be described as an academic entrepreneur always able to produce and implement innovations and new ideas and projects.
In the mid-1990s, he initiated, together with Professor Charlie Karlsson, the yearly Uddevalla Symposia as a collaboration between Jönköping International Business School, The School of Public Policy at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, and University West, Trollhättan, Sweden. The first symposium was held in Uddevalla, Sweden in 1998 and the last one was held in L’Aquila, Italy in 2019. From 2000 to 2002, he was the president of the European Regional Science Association (ERSA) and between 1994 and 2014 he served as one of the main editors for the Annals of Regional Science. To honour the memory of him and his co-editor, the late Roger R. Stough, the Western Regional Science Association initiated the Stough-Johansson Springer Award–an award given annually to the best paper presented by an early-career scholar (no more than five years post-PhD) at the annual meeting of the Western Regional Science Association (WRSA).
In his work in academia, Börje Johansson was a persistently active and highly appreciated researcher, teacher and not least supervisor of many PhD students. Besides his engagement in academia, he was constantly active as a highly valued policy advisor. Moreover, he was an influential author and co-author of more than one hundred analytical reports for national, regional, and local agencies and authorities but also for private industry. In this capacity, he showed an extraordinary ability to apply his theoretical knowledge and empirical skills to practical problems at all levels in society. Overall, Börje Johansson was an intellectual thinker had an extraordinary scholarly and personal integrity combined with a strong work ethics and a terse sense of humour inherited from his family background in the Swedish west-coast, north of Gothenburg.
4 The most appreciated research contributions by Börje Johansson
In this section, we briefly present the journal articles, book chapters and editorships published by Börje Johansson that other researchers seem to have acknowledged most judging by the number of citations. In Table 1, we present the journal articles by Börje Johansson with the highest citation frequency measured by the number citations/year according to Google Scholar.
Table 1
The Journal Articles by Börje Johansson with the Highest Citation Frequency According to Google Scholar
No.
Title
Citations/year
1
Agglomeration and Networks in Spatial Economies (2004)
19.9
2
Time Distances and Labour Market Integration (2002)
11.2
3
Commuters’ Nonlinear Response to Time Distances (2003)
10.9
4
Innovation Activities Explained by Firm Attributes and Location (2008)
9.7
5
Innovation Ideas and Regional Characteristics–Product Innovations and Export Entrepreneurship by Firms in Swedish Regions (2008)
4.8
6
Learning-by-exporting and Innovation Strategies (2015)
4.7
7
Agglomeration Dynamics of Business Services (2011)
4.2
8
European R&D Efficiency (2015)
3.7
9
R&D Strategy, Metropolitan Externalities and Productivity: Evidence from Sweden (2014)
3.4
9
Geographic Clustering and Outward Foreign Direct Investment (2012)
3.4
11
Internal and External Knowledge and Introduction of Export Varieties (2015)
3.3
12
Infrastructure, Accessibility, and Growth (1993)
2.7
13
Affinities and Frictions of Trade Networks (1994)
2.2
14
Clustering, MNEs and Innovation: Who Benefits and How? (2013)
2.0
An alternative to highlight a researcher's journal publications is to analyse in which journals he/she publishes. The journals in which Börje Johansson has published are reviewed in Table 2, which shows that almost 70% of his journal publications have been in regional science journals with a strong focus on Papers in Regional Science, The Annals of Regional Science and Regional Science and Urban Economics. Among the other journals he published in, there are four articles in Economics of Innovation and New Technology, which indicate Börje Johansson’s growing interest in innovation research over the years. His journal publications stretch from 1974 to 2017, covering a period of forty-four years.
Table 2
Scientific Journals in which Börje Johansson has published
Journal
No. of articles (%)
Regional Science Journals
26 (68.4)
Papers in Regional Science
7
The Annals of Regional Science
5
Regional Science and Urban Economics
4
Geographical Analysis
1
Growth and Change
1
Regional Studies
1
International Journal of Transport Economics
1
Journal of Applied Regional Science
1
Journal of Geographical Systems
1
Journal of Infrastructure Planning and Management
1
Letters in Spatial and Resource Economics
1
Scandinavian Housing and Planning Review
1
Systemi Urbani
1
Other Journals
12 (23.6)
Economics of Innovation and New Technology
4
Chaos, Solitons and Fractals
1
Industry and Innovation
1
International Business Review
1
International Journal of the Economics of Business
1
Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade
1
Research in Economics
1
Scandinavian Journal of Economics
1
The World Economy
1
In Appendix A2, we present book chapters authored and co-authored by Börje Johansson. He published his first book chapter in 1985 and the last one in 2019. In total, there are fifty-three book chapters authored or co-authored by Börje Johansson in Appendix A2. Of these book chapters, twenty or 38.5% are found in edited books published by Springer and eighteen or 34.6% can be found in edited books published by Edward Elgar, both major publishers within regional science. We present the book chapters by Börje Johansson with the highest citation frequency measured by the number citations/year, according to Google Scholar, in Table 3.
Table 3
Book Chapters by Börje Johansson with the Highest Citation Frequency according to Google Scholar
No.
Title
Citations/year
1
Parsing the Menagerie of Agglomeration and Network Externalities (2005)
6.2
2
Regional Development and Knowledge (2019)
5.0
3
Geographic Transaction Costs and Specialisation Opportunities of Small- and Medium-sized Regions: Scale Economies and Market Extension (2001)
4.9
4
Dynamics and Entrepreneurship in a Knowledge-based Economy (2006)
3.9
5
The Analysis of Location, Colocation and Urbanisation Economies (2008)
3.7
6
Knowledge, Innovation and Space: Introduction (2014)
3.6
7
Knowledge, Creativity and Regional Development (2012)
2.8
8
Creative Milieus in the Stockholm Region (2011)
2.7
9
Infrastructure, Labour Market Accessibility and Economic Development (2007)
2.5
10
Knowledge and Regional Development (2009)
2.4
11
Industrial Clusters and Inter-firm Networks. Introduction (2005)
2.1
11
Entrepreneurship, Clusters and Policy in the Emerging Digital Economy (2006)
2.1
13
Transport Infrastructure Inside and Across Urban Regions: Models and Assessment Methods (2008)
2.0
13
Innovation Strategies: Combing Internal and External Knowledge (2014)
2.0
In Appendix A3, we present Börje Johansson’s editorships. The list contains twenty-six books that he has edited or co-edited. Table 4 shows the books edited by Börje Johansson with the highest citation frequency measured by the number citations/year according to Google Scholar. His work as an editor stretches from 1985 to 2014, i.e. that is, a period of 30 years in which he has been the editor or co-editor of almost one book a year. Of the books that Börje Johansson edited or co-edited, eleven or 42.3% are published by Edward Elgar and seven or 26.9% are published by Springer, which again shows a domination for the two major publishers within regional science.
Table 4
Editorships by Börje Johansson with the Highest Citation Frequency, According to Google Scholar
No.
Title
Citations/year
1
Industrial Clusters and Inter-firm Networks (2005)
12.1
2
Theories of Endogenous Regional Growth: Lessons for Regional Policies (2001)
10.0
3
Innovation & Growth. From R&D Strategies of Innovating Firms to Economy-Wide Technological Change (2012)
5.1
3
The Emerging Digital Economy (2006)
5.1
5
Road Pricing: Theory, Empirical Assessment and Policy (1995)
4.8
6
Knowledge, Innovation and Space (2014)
3.6
7
Patterns of a Network Economy (1994)
3.2
7
Entrepreneurship and Regional Development (2010)
3.2
9
Innovation, Technology and Knowledge (2012)
2.6
9
Entrepreneurship, Social Capital, and Governance. Direction for the Sustainable Development and Competitiveness of Regions (2012)
2.6
11
Innovation, Agglomeration and Regional Competition (2009)
2.3
12
Regional Policies and Comparative Advantages (2002)
2.1
12
Agglomeration, Clusters and Entrepreneurship. Studies in Regional Economic Development (2014)
2.1
5 Börje Johansson’s research co-operation
An interesting aspect of Börje Johansson’s scientific work is his strong orientation towards co-operation as manifested here in co-authorships. Of the thirty-eight journal articles in Appendix A1 only six are single authored. The first column in Table 5 presents his journal co-authors. The list of co-authors not only includes Swedes but also researchers from Australia, Austria, Great Britain, Italy, and the US, which illustrates his international orientation and his strong international network. The list also includes five of his former PhD students. Most frequently, he co-authored journal articles with Hans Lööf, Johan Klaesson and John Roy. In total, the list contains forty collaborations. The list of co-authors also includes several of his former PhD students, namely Sara Johansson, Charlie Karlsson, Johan Klaesson, Michael Olsson, Tina Wallin and Lars Westin.
Table 5
Börje Johansson’s Research Co-operation
Co-authors for journal articles
Co-authors for book chapters
Co-editors
Author
No.
Author
No.
Editor
No.
Hans Lööf
6
Charlie Karlsson
15
Charlie Karlsson
19
Johan Klaesson
4
Roger R Stough
7
Roger R. Stough
14
John Roy
3
Hans Lööf
4
Åke E Andersson
2
Martin Andersson
2
David Batten
4
William P Andersson
2
David Batten
2
Ulla Forslund
3
David Batten
2
Gary Cook
2
Johan Klaesson
3
Kioshi Kobayashi
2
Naresh Pandit
2
Åke E. Andersson
2
T.R. Lakshmanan
2
Håkan Persson
2
Scott Hacker
2
Folke Snickars
2
Lars Westin
2
John Casti
1
Martin Andersson
1
Åke E. Andersson
1
Gary Cook
1
Martin Beckmann
1
Manfred M Fischer
1
Berndt Ebersberger
1
John Casti
1
Ulla Forslund
1
Manfred M. Fischer
1
Scott Hacker
1
Sara Johansson
1
Ingvar Holmberg
1
Johan Klaesson
1
Charlie Karlsson
1
Kioshi Kobayashi
1
Hans Lööf
1
Parvis Nabavi Larijani
1
Georgio Leonardi
1
Peter Nijkamp
1
Jan Larsson
1
Naresh Pandit
1
Roland Thord
1
Lars-Göran Larsson
1
Thomas Paulsson
1
Lars Westin
1
Georgi Leonardi
1
Ulf Strömqvist
1
Mikael Olsson
1
Lars Westin
1
John Quigley
1
Maxim Savin
1
Folke Snickars
1
Ulf Strömqvist
1
Tina Wallin
1
Σ
40
51
54
Turning now to book chapters, we can see that of the fifty-two book chapters listed in Appendix A2, only fifteen are single authored. The share of single-authored contributions is somewhat higher here than for journal articles, but still, what dominates the picture is the high share of co-authored chapters. Similarly, to the articles by Börje Johansson, the collaborations highlighted in Table 5 contain Swedes including some of his former PhD students, as well as researchers from Australia, Austria, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan and the US. Also here, we see the same international orientation and well-developed international network. Regarding co-authored book chapters, Börje Johansson's most frequent co-authorships were with Charlie Karlson, Roger R. Stough, David Batten, Hans Lööf, Johan Klaesson and Ulla Forslund. In total, the list in column 2 of Table 5 contains fifty-one collaborations.
Finally, we turn to Börje Johansson’s twenty-six editorships in Appendix A3. Here, we find that they are all a result of collaborations. Besides Swedes, he has co-edited with researchers from Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and the US. The strong international orientation is echoed here as in his well-developed international network. In his function as a book editor, Börje Johansson, particularly, co-operated with Charlie Karlsson and Roger R. Stough. The list in column 3 in Table 5 shows fifty-four collaborations on book editing.
In Fig. 1, we illustrate by means cluster analysis Börje Johansson’s network of co-authors using data from Web of Science. This, and later graphs in this paper, uses betweenness centrality as a means of detecting the amount of influence a node has over the flow of information in the graph. This measure is used to identify nodes that serve as a bridge between various parts of a graph. The algorithm calculates unweighted shortest paths between all pairs of nodes in a graph. Betweenness centrality quantifies the number of times a node acts as a bridge along the shortest path between two other nodes. It was introduced as a measure for quantifying the control of a human on the communication between other humans in a social network. It should be noted that the colouring of co-authors reflects a temporal dimension, in which early collaborations are marked in blue while joint works of a later date are in yellow.
Fig. 1
Börje Johansson’s Network of Co-authors According to Web of Science
×
We complement this network of co-authors in Fig. 2 by using data on co-authorships from Google Scholar. Now also publications in Swedish are included as well as publications that have not undergone any peer review. The network of co-authors in Fig. 2 is much richer than in Fig. 1. In principle, Fig. 2 includes Börje Johansson’s central co-author network and three more peripheral and temporary co-author networks. The blue sub-network emerged when Börje Johansson was active at Cerum at the University of Umeå and illustrates that he during that time co-authored with researchers with a background in sociology, political science, business administration and technology. The light green network mirrors a large research project, “Sweden in the Europe of Tomorrow” started in 1988 by Professor Åke E. Andersson at the Institute of Futures Studies in Stockholm with participants not only from economics but also from economic geography, political science, history of ideas and business administration. This project generated several books published in Swedish only. Both these two sub-networks illustrate the openness and curiosity of Börje Johansson. He never hesitated to cooperate with researchers from other scientific fields. The dark green sub-network of co-authors mirrors Börje Johansson’s engagement in analyses of infrastructure and transportation.
Fig. 2
Börje Johansson’s Network of Co-authors According to Google Scholar (We thank Professor Emeritus Folke Snickars for letting us use this network picture.)
×
6 Central analytical concepts in Börje Johansson’s research publications
Research in the social sciences, such as regional science, is to a considerable extent developed around concepts. There exist numerous examples of concepts that may evolve into research fields of its own under the umbrella of regional science. Infrastructure, agglomeration, location and network are examples of such concepts. Scholars that manage to influence and develop the analytical toolbox in a research field are likely to become leaders in their respective research field. Therefore, it is highly rewarding to analyse which concepts scholars use.
In this section, we highlight central analytical concepts in Börje Johansson’s scientific publications. In Table 6, we present an overview of the most common analytical concepts in the titles of his journal articles, book chapters and edited books. It is of course no surprise to anyone that the most frequent category of analytical concepts used by the regional science scholar Börje Johansson is “spatial, region, regions and regional”. He uses these conceptual cognates forty-two times. The second most used category of analytical concepts relates to “dynamics, evolution and change”, which emerge thirty-one times, indicating Börje Johansson’s great interest in questions related to dynamic (regional) processes. Looking at row three in Table 6, we find the third most used type of analytical concepts, namely “location, colocation, clusters and clustering”. In principle, these concepts combine geographical space with dynamics, evolution and change since they represent a process that over time changes the character of geographical space.
Table 6
Börje Johansson’s central analytical concepts
No.
Analytical concepts
Journal articles
Book chapters
Edited books
Σ
1
Spatial, region, regions and regional
10
19
13
42
2
Dynamics, evolution, and change
13
14
4
31
3
Location, colocation, clusters and clustering
8
13
2
23
3
Innovation, innovating and technical change
7
9
7
23
5
Growth and development
2
10
5
17
5
Metropolitan, urban, and agglomeration
7
7
3
17
7
Knowledge
3
6
7
16
8
Networks
4
7
3
14
9
Export and trade
9
3
0
12
10
Entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial
1
4
6
11
11
Infrastructure
2
5
2
9
12
Policy and policies
1
4
3
8
13
Investments
3
0
0
3
14
R&D
2
0
1
3
Interestingly, in the next row “innovation, innovating and technical change” indicate some of the fundamental drivers behind changes in location as well as behind “growth and development” that we find in the next row with the concepts “metropolitan, urban and agglomeration” and if we take all the most commonly used analytical concepts mentioned so far, we have in principle a summary of Börje Johansson’s main research programme, namely dynamic spatial processes, their drivers and their results.
The rest of his central analytical concepts mentioned in Table 6 are complementary concepts for his main research programme. All these concepts relate to activities located in geographical space. Knowledge is generated somewhere and then diffused to other locations but often with a delay. Networks give structure to geographical space with their layers of diverse types of networks and determine how well connected different locations and economic actors are to each other. Export and trade have a geographical origin and a geographical destination. Entrepreneurship is a typical example of an activity located in geographical space closely related to innovation but also to the degree of agglomeration. Infrastructures are highly localised and the backbone of all sorts of networks. Politicians have for many decades used various policies to influence the location behaviour of economic agents. Investments are critical for the development of networks but also for knowledge generation as well as for R&D, which is a critical human activity highly concentrated in geographical space.
When we in Fig. 3 applied cluster analysis using data from Web of Science, a different picture of Börje Johansson’s central analytical concept emerged. The reason is that this cluster diagram is not only based upon the titles of the journal articles but also upon the words in the abstract for each article. We recognise some of the analytical concepts from column 1 in Table 6, but now several new analytical concepts come into the picture. If we study the colour bar in Fig. 3, we see that Börje Johansson in his research interest has moved from left to right with externalities as bridge or connection between his earlier and his later research interests, as well as between two groups of intra-related analytical concepts, which both contain central analytical regional science concepts.
Fig. 3
Central Analytical Concepts Used by Börje Johansson According to Web of Science
×
What is remarkably interesting here is that externalities surface as his central analytical concept and it is not by chance. A search on Google Scholar combining the name Börje Johansson with externality/externalities gave ninety-four hits, thus illustrating the significant role of this analytical concept in Börje Johansson’s research agenda already in the 1980s.
Starting with the left-hand side, we can identify several sub-clusters. The analytic concept furthest to the left is monopolistic competition and it illustrates that Börje Johansson during his whole academic career tried to orient away from macroeconomic thinking towards microeconomic analysis. Moreover, already in his thesis in economics 1978, Contributions to sequential analysis of oligopolistic competition, he showed that the area of economics with imperfect competition, in-between monopoly markets and highly competitive markets, where actors gain interest from temporary advantages, inertia and games against other actors in the market, was in focus of his interest. It should not come as a surprise that his thesis thus also contained a part where sequentiality, i.e. a dynamic set of relocations in a Hotelling type of duopoly, is studied.
When searching Google Scholar for monopolistic competition and Börje Johansson, this impression was confirmed. We got sixty-two hits. Thus, a very substantial number of the analyses that he performed were based upon the assumption that monopolistic competition prevails in markets. Exceedingly early he embraced the New Economic Geography (NEG) thinking, which is natural since NEG assumes that monopolistic competition prevails in at least one market.
On the left-hand side, we find two other analytical concepts, namely built environment and networks. They both represent slowly changing and localised characteristics of society and in that sense, they form a long-term structure for society and hence the foundation for more rapid processes in society. This aspect became, incredibly early, one of the foundations for Börje Johansson’s analytical and scientific approach. It got further support from empirical studies, published in Swedish, of the economy of the cities of Gothenburg and Stockholm, and continued to influence his analytical thinking during his whole academic career. These concepts can be combined in the notion of infrastructure, which was the topic of an innovative book written in Swedish together with Folke Snickars in the early 1990s.4 They were typical of the work that Börje Johansson performed early in his career and formed the core of his conceptual thinking during his period at KTH.
On the left-hand side, we also find a sub-cluster consisting of innovation, R&D and cities indicating that innovation, and R&D to a very great extent are urban activities. Interestingly, all three concepts are intricately connected to productivity in the sense that they all are critical determinants of productivity. The time bar shows that this was a research field that Börje Johansson focused on during the later parts of his academic career.
On the right-hand side, we find city, location, and clusters together with multinational corporations and fdi,5 which create a cluster of analytical concepts of its own. From a regional science point of view, the relationship between five analytical concepts is obvious. Also, the time bar here shows that Börje Johansson started to focus on this research complex during the later parts of his academic career. Given the frequent use of the two concepts city and cities by Börje Johansson, it might seem surprising that concepts, such as land use, real estate and property markets do not appear in Fig. 3.6 One explanation might be that Börje Johansson focused more on cities as agglomerations and the location for many clusters instead of the inner functioning of cities.
7 Börje Johansson’s theoretical inspirators, fellow researchers and often cited researchers
In this section we give an overview of Börje Johansson’s predecessors, peers and influencers, i.e. the researchers that he has cited most often, and the sources that these authors in turn have cited. In bibliometric research, this is sometimes called the “intellectual basis” of a field, or of a specific scholar (Persson 1994). The underlying assumption here is that his citation pattern will give us a picture of which researchers inspired him in his research. Obviously, this implies that we only identify some of the researchers that were important to Börje Johansson in his early carrier, that is, those he established closer collaboration with later. One could image that the connections between department of Economics in Gothenburg and many famous researchers in economics in Oslo, with interest in production theory, computable general equilibrium models and game theory such as Ragnar Frisch, Leif Johansen and Finn R. Försund inspired Börje Johansson as he was formed as a researcher.
Anyhow, by analysing the referencing behaviour of scholars, we can get a deeper understanding of their intellectual development. Of special interest are those researchers that others cite frequently, and thus become part of the ‘citation identity of the citing scientist (White 2001). Frequently, cited authors tend to be connected to the citing author both intellectually as well as socially, and direct citation links, therefore give clues about the social network of researchers. Hence, following the scientists that Börje Johansson cited most frequently during different periods provides a picture of how his inspiration sources varied over time and how his social network of researchers developed.
Figure 4 illustrates Börje Johansson’s intellectual and social network and how it developed over time going from right to left. Unfortunately, the database was not rich enough to divide Börje Johansson’s career into two halves, which would have made it possible to provide deeper insights into how his networks developed over time. We will not comment on this network and its development over time, but instead make a few remarks. To the right, we find researchers that Börje Johansson got to know at his time at IIASA during the early 1980s, namely John Roy, T. R. Lakshmanan, David Batten and John Casti who became his friends for life. The diagram shows a remarkably close relationship between Börje Johansson and Åke E. Andersson. They met in Gothenburg in the 1970s. Åke E. Andersson was the main supervisor of his thesis and they became close friends and collaborators for the rest of their lives.
Fig. 4
Börje Johansson’s Theoretical Inspirators, Fellow Researchers and Often Cited Researchers
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To the left, we see a strong influence of Börje Johansson’s time at Jönköping International Business School (JIBS) through the links to Charlie Karlsson and Martin Andersson. Börje Johansson and Charlie Karlsson had started to collaborate in the early 1980s in Karlstad, and Martin Andersson received his PhD at JIBS in 2007 and developed a close co-operation on regional science issues with both Börje Johansson and Charlie Karlsson. Looking for influences from other regional science scholars, we see a considerable influence from Masahisa Fujita, Jörgen Weibull, Maryann Feldman and Vernon Henderson.
8 Concluding remarks
The aim of this paper has been to highlight Börje Johansson’s scientific contributions with a special focus on his contributions to the field of regional science based upon his international publications. This is obviously a limitation as far from every scholarly contribution is indexed in a citation database. Still, by including broader data sources, such as Google Scholar and DiVA, we hope to provide a more complete picture. Hopefully, the overview provided here might also serve as a natural starting point for those who want to engage further with the work of Johansson. While clearly beyond the purpose of this study, there are further possibilities which may be used when studying the influence of individual scholars. One is to study acknowledgments in papers books and chapter (Desrochers et al. 2018), another to look at the genealogy of scholars in terms of generations of doctoral students (Sugimoto et al. 2011). Clearly, the legacy of a scholar is not only measured in the number of papers produced, but in the fostering of new generations of scholars. Hence, a genealogical approach would be an interesting, and potentially fruitful, development of the analysis presented here.
Overall, we think that we present a fair portrait of the scientist Börje Johansson and a portrait that clearly illustrates his contribution to regional science in Sweden as well as abroad. His most important contributions to regional science are that (i) he further developed the theoretical foundations of economic network theory and was one of the most important introducers of that concept into the regional science community, (ii) he and (John Quigley) started the discussion on the relationship between networks and agglomeration and (iii) he further developed the geographers' concept of “economic potentials” into an accessibility concept that has become an important tool for spatial analyses (Karlsson et al 2009; Gråsjö and Karlsson 2014).7
At the same time, it is important to emphasise that an overview of Börje Johansson’s scientific contributions only covers certain aspects of his influence in the academy and society at large, as partly described in the introduction.
However, this bibliometric portrait tells truly little about the person Börje Johansson. Such a portrait would have required many interviews with many people and be far beyond the scope of this paper. We hope that researchers who had the pleasure and privilege of knowing Börje Johansson recognise the scholarly portrait of him sketched here. If this is so, we have achieved our purpose. Still, publishing is only one part of the academic contribution of a scholar, and Börje Johansson’s considerable efforts in creating networks, advancing the field of regional science, and supporting young researchers is part of his legacy that live on, not in written record, but in the memory of his colleagues and friends.
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One example of this is Folke Snickars who was his predecessor as director of Cerum, as deputy leader of the regional development group at IIASA, as President of the European Regional Science Association, and finally instrumental in securing a position for him at KTH.
Börje Johansson became very influential in Karlstad and in the province of Värmland, where Karlstad is located. In 1980, he presented a report on the prerequisites for industrial development in Värmland during the 1980s, where he among other things presented arguments for aggressive investments in R&D related to the forest industry. In 1982, an R&D council was established to implement this and, interestingly, today we can observe that R&D related to the forest industry is the strongest R&D field at the present Karlstad University. Börje Johansson also opened new international contacts for the university college in Karlstad, not least with Japan that are still in operation. In 1987, together with Åke E. Andersson, he organised the first large international research conference at Karlstad university college. It was the five-day conference RICE (Research and Development, Industrial Change and Economic Policy), which attracted more than one hundred researchers in economics and regional science from Australia, Europe, Japan and the US. Similarly, he was also instrumental in establishing a network of adjunct professors in economics for the university college in Karlstad including the professors Åke E. Andersson, Tönu Puu and Sören Wibe, who, like Börje Johansson, were professors at the university in Umeå.
Between 1990 and 1994, Börje Johansson was deputy member of the board of Jönköping International Business School Foundation that financed the lobbying, planning and implementation of Jönköping International Business School.