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.[3][4]
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.[5]
He has authored or co-authored more than twenty books, including Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies and Interdisciplinary Research: Process and Theory.[6]
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. [4]He also served as President of the Association of Academic Staff at the University of Alberta and the Confederation of Alberta Faculty Associations in the 1990s.[10]
He served on the board of the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies for ten years, including a term as president from 2011 to 2014.[5] From 2018 to 2022, he was president of the International Society for Knowledge Organization.[11][12]
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.[10]
Scholarly work
Rick Szostak's scholarship spans a wide range of disciplines, with a sustained emphasis on integrating diverse forms of knowledge. His work is rooted in the belief that complex societal and policy challenges such as climate change, democratic instability, and global inequality require interdisciplinary approaches that synthesize insights across traditional disciplinary boundaries.[2]
Trained as an economic historian, Szostak's early research focused on industrialization, transportation, and economic development.[8] He authored books addressing two of the central questions in the field: the causes of the Industrial Revolution and of the Great Depression.[13]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.[14]
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.[13]
His publications include Making Sense of the Future[15] 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. [16]
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. [2]
His co-authored textbooks, Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies and Interdisciplinary Research: Process and Theory, are widely used in undergraduate and graduate programs that incorporate interdisciplinary studies. [17]
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.[18][2]
Szostak's "Manifesto of Interdisciplinarity" outlines the core principles of interdisciplinary scholarship and argues for its relevance in academic research, public policy, and education. He articulates interdisciplinarity as a practice of integration that complements and extends disciplinary knowledge, providing tools for creative problem-solving and intellectual openness.[18]
In the field of knowledge organization, Szostak has advanced theories of classification, particularly about causal and non-causal relationships.[19]
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