Utbildningar vid NASP – det svenska nationella centret för suicidforskning och prevention av psykisk ohälsa

 The witness seminar Staten och kapitalet: Betydelsen av det dynamiska samspelet mellan offentligt och privat för det svenska telekomundret [The State and the Capital: The Implications of the Dynamic Cooperation Between the Public and Private Sphere for the Swedish Telecomunications Wonder] was held at The National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm on 18 March 2008 and was led by Professor Bertil Thorngren. The seminar discussion revolved around the collaboration between the state-owned Telecommunications operator Televerket and the private-owned telecommunication firms LM Ericsson and SRA (later ERA) from the 1960s to the 1990s. The seminar revealed that the employees of Televerket never really thought of themselves as being part of a stateowned company, viewing the ’’State’’ as something distant. Day-to-day practices, as well as judicial regulations that prohibits a government Minister from instructing the head of a stateowned firm how to conduct the company’s business, contributed to this. The private firms, on the other hand, used the knowledge gained from their work on military communication systems, ordered and paid for by the government, when private mobile telephony became increasingly important from the 1980s and onwards. Employees were also taken away from Ericsson’s military production and put into the manufacture of mobile telephones. Military orders basically financed the Ericsson’s early work on mobile telephony until the civilian side could finance itself. The seminar agreed that without Televerket’s, and other state agencies’, high demands upon the private firms, the Swedish telecom giant Ericsson would not have existed today