Rick Szostak

Rick Szostak (born October 27, 1959) is a Canadian economist and interdisciplinary scholar best known for his work in economic history, interdisciplinarity, and knowledge organization.

He is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Alberta, where he taught for nearly four decades and served as Chair of the Department of Economics.

He is former president of International Society for Knowledge Organization and served on the board of the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies for ten years and held the position of president from 2011 to 2014.

He has authored or co-authored more than twenty books, including Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies and Interdisciplinary Research: Process and Theory. He joined the Department of Economics at the University of Alberta in 1985 and remained a faculty member until his retirement in 2023.

Throughout his career, he held several leadership positions, including Associate Dean in the Faculty of Arts from 2002 to 2005 and Chair of the Department of Economics from 2017 to 2022.

He participated in study-abroad programs in Italy and offered short courses internationally, including at the College of Europe and the University of Salento.

He has also been affiliated with the Economics Society of Northern Alberta, serving as its president in 2017 and 2018, as well as with various interdisciplinary programs at the University of Alberta, including Humanities Computing, Science, Technology and Society, and Religious Studies. The Role of Transportation in the Industrial Revolution: A Comparison of England and France (McGill-Queen's, 1991) argued that improvements to transport systems were critical in fomenting industrialization, highlighting how the emergence of common carrier networks in the mid-18th century enabled firms to sell by sample or catalog, which in turn encouraged the concentration of workers and subsequent mechanization.

In Technological Innovation and the Great Depression (Westview Press, 1995), he contended that a combination of widespread labor-saving process innovations and a dearth of new product innovations in the interwar period played a key role in deepening the Depression. and Restoring Democratic Stability: A Backcasting Wheel Approach, which apply interdisciplinary analysis to urgent policy questions and propose forward-looking strategies grounded in both empirical evidence and theoretical synthesis.

In Making Sense of World History recognized as the first open-access world history textbook written by an economist Szostak develops organizing devices to achieve coherence and pursues interdisciplinary integration across diverse types of analysis, offering a coherent global narrative.

He has also contributed to interdisciplinary pedagogy and program development through his work with the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies (AIS), where he served as president, as well as through his involvement in university-wide initiatives.

Selected bibliography

Books

Journals