Introduction

This volume grew out of a conference at the end of September 2024 at the University of Graz on the occasion of Christian Gehrke&s;s official retirement from his professorship. Unofficially, he is still very active: liberated from the duties of teaching, correcting exams and student papers, attending meetings of academic boards and the like, he has more time at his disposal to do research, write papers and books, supervise PhD theses, and work as the deputy director of the Graz Schumpeter Centre. The rate of his publications shows no signs of waning, as is testified by the list of them at the end of this volume. He is also still highly active on the editorial boards of journals, reviewing papers and organizing special issues, as an adviser of publishing houses, most notably Routledge, as an external reader of book projects, and submitting manuscripts. All these activities and many more have contributed to Christian&s;s high reputation in academia. The editors of and contributors to this volume wish to pay tribute to him as a scholar and friend and thank him for many years and even decades of fruitful joint work, his honesty, sincerity, reliability, and pleasant company.