Siemens AG Is Commissioning an Independent Academic Study of The Company's Development

Siemens AG is commissioning an independent academic study of the company's development from 1981 to 2011. The project is to be undertaken by the economic and company historian Hartmut Berghoff and the contemporary historian Cornelia Rauh. Both are being given unrestricted access to the company archives and they will be interviewing contemporary witnesses as well as researching documents. The results are expected to be published in 2014.

There are already a number of publications dealing with Siemens' history, but the most recent contemporary history has not as yet been examined in detail. The most recent major publication, realized by the company's historian Wilfried Feldenkirchen is from 1997. However, it is precisely in the last 30 years that the economic and political conditions under which the company has been operating have undergone rapid transformation through globalization and technological progress, and the period culminated in the company's reorientation at the end of the last decade (2008).

Prof Hartmut Berghoff has been head of the German Historical Institute in Washington DC, US since 2008, and teaches economic and social history at the University of Göttingen. He has held guest professorships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, at the Otto Beisheim School of Management Koblenz, at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris and at the Harvard Business School. His research fields include the history of business, consumption and globalization. Hartmut Berghoff has won various awards including the ABB-Wissenschaftspreis and the Newcomen Harvard Article Award. He is the author or editor of 14 reference books, including the textbook "Moderne Unternehmensgeschichte" (2004). In 2010 he was a contributor and consultant for a publication on the history of the Bertelsmann publishing house "175 Jahre Bertelsmann Eine Zukunftsgeschichte."

Prof Cornelia Rauh has been professor of German and European contemporary history at Leibniz University in Hanover since 2005. Prior to this she worked at Tübingen University and was a fellow at Princeton University, N. J., U.S. One of her main areas of research is business history. She has written several biographies of entrepreneurs and a series of books and numerous essays on German contemporary history. She won an award from the Association for Business History for her habilitation thesis "Aluminium für Hitlers Krieg" about a multinational Swiss company before and during World War Two.