Edith Penrose

Edith Elura Tilton Penrose (November 15, 1914 – October 11, 1996) was an American-born

At age 64, Penrose retired from SOAS and took up a position as professor of political economy at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France. When her husband died in 1984 she retired from INSEAD and moved back to the UK settling at Waterbeach, Cambridgeshire near to her surviving sons.

Contribution to Economics

The Theory of the Growth of the Firm

While at Johns Hopkins, Penrose participated in a research project on the growth of firms. She came to the conclusion that the existing theory of the firm was inadequate to explain how firms grow. Her insight was to realize that the 'Firm' in theory is not the same thing as 'flesh and blood' organizations that businessmen call firms. This insight eventually led to the publication of her second book, The Theory of the Growth of the Firm in 1959. In the introduction to the book, she writes: "All the evidence we have indicates that the growth of firms is connected with the attempts of a particular group of human beings to do something." In theorizing about companies that grow, Dr. Penrose wrote: "There are important administrative restraints on the speed of the firm's growth. Human resources required for the management of change are tied to the individual firm and so are internally scarce. Expansion requires the recruitment of more such resources. New recruits cannot become fully effective overnight. The growth process is, therefore, dynamically constrained."^{[citation needed]}

Resource-Based View of the Firm

Penrose is considered to be the first economist who posited what has become known as the Resource-based view of the firm. Strategic resources are those which are rare, difficult to duplicate, valuable, and over which a firm has control. Resources can be raw materials, such as a gold mine or oil well, or intellectual, such as patents, and even trademarks and brands (such as the valuation of the Coca-Cola brand).^{[citation needed]}

Published works

• The Economics of the International Patent System, Baltimore,
  ISBN 0-8371-6653-5
• The Theory of the Growth of the Firm, New York, John Wiley and Sons, 1959,
  ISBN 978-0-19-828977-7
• The Growth of the Firm—A Case Study: The Hercules Powder Company, Business History Review, Volume 34 Spring Issue, S. 1-23, 1960
• The Large International Firm in Developing Countries: The International Petroleum Industry, London, Allen & Unwin, 1968,
  ISBN 0-8371-8850-4
• New Orientations: Essays in International Relations, with Peter Lyon, Frank Cass & Co, 1970,
  ISBN 0-7146-2593-0
• Iraq: International Relations and National Development, with Ernest Penrose, Boulder, Westview Press, 1978,
  ISBN 0-89158-804-3

Bibliography

• Penrose, Angela (2018). No Ordinary Woman: The Life of Edith Penrose. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  ISBN 978-0198753940
  .

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