Revisiting the Uppsala model from a history-to-theory perspective: New lessons on network positioning from a global electric company

Emanuel Gomes and Álvaro Ferreira da Silva acknowledge financial support from Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (UID/00124/2025, UID/ PRR/124/2025, Nova School of Business and Economics DOI: https://doi.org/10.54499/UID/00124/2025) and LISBOA2030 (DataLab2030-LISBOA2030-FEDER-01314200). Ferran Vendrell-Herrero acknowledges support from the Spanish State Research Agency (SRA), Ministry of Science and Innovation PID2022-136235NB-I00, funded by MICIU/AEI/ https://doi.org/10.13039/501100011033 and ERDF/EU. David Lehman acknowledges support from the University of Virginia.

Much of the archival data used in this study is publicly available via the Belgian National Archives (Archives Générales du Royaume 2—Dépôt Joseph Cuvelier). Several of our sources, however, are part of Sofina’s current corporate archive, which are private and subject to third-party property rights. Using standard practices in history, we cite the sources and their archival location, which makes our historical interpretation traceable and subject to validation. We use the “verification logic” (Rowlinson et al., 2014: 260) to present the verifiable location of each source among the large set of documents investigated, including those the ones in public archives and Sofina’s corporate archive. Indeed, the reason for including such an extensive online appendix—which includes the details of the case narratives and respective sources (see Appendix A8) as well as additional source details (see Appendices A2 and A6)—stems from that verification logic. We have also included additional details to clarify the historical method (see Appendices A3, A4, and A5).