Born
in 1951 in Sävar, northern Sweden. Wanted to be an engine driver
on the national Railways in her teens but was refused since she lacked
the necessary experience at the railway yard. But since women were not
allowed to practice at railway yards at that time, it became a classic
hen and egg dilemma. Bi waved bye, bye to the bureaucrats and set off
towards the newly opened university in nearby Umeå. She began to
study history and economics while financing her studies as a teacher.
For a time she worked in Trondheim doing research on the vast material at the National Archives concerning the emigration from Scandinavia to the New World from 1850 and onwards; she attended courses at the London School of Economics and tried living in the alternative village Christiania in Copenhagen. Although she studied many different subjects, the department of Economic History was her home at the university.
On a personal level she adopted a somewhat adventurous lifestyle - mountaineering, cycling thousands of kilometres around Sweden, parachuting...
At
the age of 22, one of her mentors - Egil Johansson, a priest and professor
of pedagogy at the university - offered her job as director for the then
new Demographic Data Base in Haparanda
- a tiny town close to the Arctic Circle. Her job was to build up a production
unit and to run the office where 120 women were employed making digital
excerpts from the unique Swedish church archives. This way she became
one of the real pioneers of Information Technology. She later became director
for the research archives on modern media and a member of the governmental
reference group on IT.
During her term as director at the Demogaphic Data Base Bi began writing and doing the research for her doctoral thesis on tuberculosis. She took her doctorate in Umeå in 1984. The same year she left the subarctic north to become project leader in Lund of a team doing research at the Institute for Health Economics. Bi later became editor-in-chief for the National Encyclopaedia in Höganäs - at the same time she led one of the most popular television programmes in the history of Swedish Television - "Kvitt eller dubbelt".
Eventually
she ended up in Stockholm in 1988, having been appointed project director
at the Institute for
Futures Studies. She was responsible for the Life and Health Project
- her own research was on women's ill-health. Parallel to this she initiated
research programmes on the changes in young people's values and belief
patterns both in Sweden and internationally. She hosted a research group
in Gothenburg and was appointed head of the National
Cultural Committee on Information Technology by the Swedish government.
Her work on core values and globalization has led her to Sophia Antipolis,
France, where she is continuing her work in trying to understand how the
technology shift affects creativity and management in our organizations
and corporations.
Busy as a Bee - Bi is pronounced bee in swedish - she is proceeding with in-depth studies with a broad perspective, combining her findings in her special way, producing reports, films, presentations live or on various media. You can a take look at some of the finished and ongoing projects at Presentation. Just click for a few glimpses of Bi's present history.
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©2010
Bi
Puranen