Edith penrose’s influence on economic analysis, strategic management and political economy

ABSTRACT

Edith Penrose is best known for her classic book The Theory of the Growth of the Firm, originally published in 1959, but she also made major contributions in other fields, including patents, the oil industry, and development economics. This special double issue of the International Review of Applied Economics publishes recent research from a range of leading economists and management scholars from across the world, either explicitly analysing Penrose’s contribution, or else analysing topics from firms’ collaborations with universities through to the practice and consequences of share buy-backs, which demonstrate that a Penrosian perspective helps to illuminate the reality of such processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Edith Penrose
• growth of the firm
• patents
• innovation
• development economics

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• A11
• B13
• B50
• D22
• L25
• O12

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Keynes wrote in the Preface to his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money that ‘The composition of this book has been for the author a long struggle of escape, and so must the reading of it be for most readers if the author’s assault upon them is to be successful – a struggle of escape from habitual modes of thought and expression. The ideas which are here expressed so laboriously are extremely simple and should be obvious. The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds’ (Keynes, 1936, p. viii).