Bring in the brewers: business entry in the Swedish brewing industry from 1830 to 2012

Abstract

This article analyses long-term business entry in the Swedish brewing industry, presenting new data on its organisational historiography. Since 1830, the rate of entry has varied considerably; entries increased progressively from the 1850s, and fell at a decreasing rate from the early twentieth century. An increasing tendency to enter the trade can be observed from the mid-1980s -in particular, there has been a considerable resurgence since the turn of the millennium. The article elaborates on explanations that are both exogenous and endogenous. Above all, the results provide support for the role of endogenous conditions. The results should be viewed as complementary to previous analyses of the (Swedish) brewing industry, which either have employed shorter analytical time-frames or have mainly focused on the role of exogenous conditions, such as changes in the institutional framework.

Craft breweries and local place development – Perspectives from a Scandinavian context

“…Furthermore, the two nations’ craft brewing industry has, over the last decade, experienced an expansion, similar to the rest of the world. Box (2017), and Halkier et al (2017) argue that there is a renewed interest in local beer and local products in Scandinavia. Maehle (2021) points out how rapidly the Norwegian craft beer sector has grown since the beginning of 2000, identifying shifting consumer demand towards unique, local flavours as the main underlying factor for this shift.…”

The Swedish alcohol monopoly: A bottleneck for microbrewers in Sweden?

“…Sandberg (2010) has described the decline of small breweries and strong consolidation of the industry from 1890 up till 1975. Box (2017) studies of business entries into the Swedish brewing industry from 1830 to 2012 points out that the decline of the number of breweries continued until the late 1980s. After that, initial moderate increases could be detected, accountable to the new craft beer phase and also the relaxation of alcohol legislation (Halkier et al, 2017).…”

“…At that time, alcohol abuse was a tremendous public health problem and during the period of industrialisation, the problem became even worse. In the early 1890s, further legal interventions aiming to stop drunkenness and improve social order were introduced and several different restrictions were imposed over the following decades (Box, 2017). In 1917, the government introduced a new tool to come to terms with the ongoing problems associated with alcohol abuse-the passbook.…”

“…With a personal passbook, Swedes were allowed to buy a certain amount of alcohol; healthy men with a job could purchase on average 3 l of liquor per month (Johansson, 2008). The politically and socially more liberal attitudes toward alcohol after the World War II (Box, 2017), in combination with massive critique of the passbook, led to an abandon of the passbook in 1955 which also is the same year that the new core of the Swedish alcohol monopoly, Systembolaget, was founded. Systembolaget has since been the country's only retailer of alcoholic beverages stronger than 3.5% alcohol, and is today the world's largest buyer of alcohol products from all over the world, offering a wide range of quality-assured products, from beer to wine and liquor, in around 900 stores around Sweden (Systembolaget, 2020).…”

Modelling the network economy: A population ecology perspective on network dynamics

“…Generally, population ecology theory and its classic density-dependence model assume that legitimacy and competition can be best captured by timeindependent density functions. The existing theory cannot therefore explain the industrial resurgence in mature industries (Box, 2017). Informed by recent writings on mutualistic and competitive mechanisms from community ecology theory (Zhou and van Witteloostuijn, 2010;Çakmaklı et al, 2017;2020;Boone et al, 2018;García-Díaz et al, 2020;Liu and van Witteloostuijn, 2020), we define the interacting populations in the community that affect an organizational population as a symbiotic organizational population and as a competitive organizational population.…”