Rolv Petter Amdam

Professor. BI Norwegian Business School

Executive education, Business education, Industrial clusters, Maritime industry, Mulitinationals
Business Historians at Business Schools

Amdam is Professor of Business History at BI Norwegian Business School and was in 2015 (fall) The Alfred D. Chandler International Visiting Scholar in Business History at Harvard Business School. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Oslo on a study on the history of business education in Norway and has studied the role of business schools in the creation of European management practice within a EU funded project. He has also served as the Dean of BI’ Executive Programmes for four years. In 2001 Amdam was the leader of the organizing committee of the EBHA conference in Oslo.

In addition to studies on business education, he has published papers and books on e.g. the glass industry, pharmaceutical industry, Americanization, regional development, knowledge transfer and internationalisation of cluster firms.

Service to the BHC

Hagley Book Prize Committee 2018 - 2019

Recent Conference Participation

2026 BHC Meeting: Presenter, "Tackling Grand Challenges by Offering an Alternative to the US business School Model in the Global South: The ILO Management Development Model" Chair, Global Histories of Management Education and Training (II): Domestic Business Elites and Management Education and Training
2025 BHC meeting: Presenter, "Introducing Management Development and Training in North Africa"
2024 BHC Meeting: Presenter, "Making Managers in Asia. India and the Philippines in a Geopolitical Context, 1950s-1970s"
2023 BHC Meeting: Presenter, "The Impact of Deglobalization and Trade Wars on Industry Dynamics: Norwegian Cod Fish and Portuguese Port Wine in a Bilateral Context, 1920-1940" Chair, Laboring over Standards
2023 BHC Meeting: Presenter, "A framework for studying ILO’s productivity and management development missions" Chair, Laboring over Standards
2022 BHC Meeting : Presenter, "ILO and the making of managers in Argentina" Discussant, The Education of Business and the Business of Education
2021 BHC Virtual Meeting: Presenter, "The Growth of US Multinational Enterprises and the Birth of International Business as an Academic Discipline"
2020 BHC Meeting: Presenter, "Interactions between Academia and Business on Internationalization: Teaching Cases on Multinational Enterprises in U.S. Business Schools, 1955-1964" Discussant, Entrepreneurship in Education