Edith Penrose

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Edith Elura Penrose , née Tilton (born November 15, 1914 in Los Angeles , California , † October 11, 1996 in Waterbeach , Cambridgeshire , Great Britain), was an American-British economist . Her main work is The Theory of the Growth of the Firm from 1959.

Life

Penrose began her studies in Los Angeles, the town where she was born. She moved to Baltimore , where she did her Masters and PhD at Johns Hopkins University with Fritz Machlup . Her dissertation was a study of the growth of the Hercules Powder Company. After stays in Geneva , Toronto and London , Penrose returned to Baltimore University for the next 10 years in 1950. In the course of the McCarthy era , she and her second husband had to leave the country more or less voluntarily because of “un-American activities”. After stays in Australia - Guggenheim Fellowship at the Australian National University in Canberra - and at the University of Baghdad , she came to London in 1960, where she stayed for the next 20 years.

At first half working at LSE and SOAS , in 1964 she became Professor of Economics with a focus on Asia at SOAS. She held this chair until 1978. From 1977 to 1984 she worked at INSEAD , the last two years after her retirement in 1982 as Associate Dean.

Penrose married David Denhardt at a very young age in 1934, who died in 1938. She had a son with him. During her time at Johns Hopkins University, she met Ernest Penrose , who held an economics chair there and whom she married in 1944. She worked with him for the International Labor Office in Geneva and Toronto and as an advisor to the American Ambassador in London, John Winant . With Penrose, who died in 1984, Edith Penrose had three other sons.

Penrose received honorary doctorates from Uppsala and Helsinki Universities . She was a member of the Economic Committee of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) from 1970 to 1976, the Council of the Royal Economic Society from 1975 to 1980, Director of the Commonwealth Development Corporation from 1975 to 1978 and a member of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI ) from 1992 to 1994.

The Theory of the Growth of the Firm

Essential statements

In the Penrose model, a company is a bundle of physical and intangible resources . The management of such a company can therefore be equated with the management of this bundle of resources.

A resource, even if it is the same resource, is not the same for two companies. Differences between two companies are based on the one hand on different resources, but on the other hand on the differences in the productive services that the companies undertake with these resources. Productive services are all services that are to be provided for the company's product directly (e.g. production or performance) or indirectly (e.g. R&D, internal services).

The productive services of a company based on its specific resources are unique in the specific context, on the one hand because they are intrinsically unique (e.g. employees), on the other hand because they can only be generated in a specific context. However, the resources of a company for generating productive services are never fully utilized, since they are naturally only available in a discrete and indivisible manner. New resources are continuously generated from existing resources and new productive services devised, since more knowledge results in more resources and thus new services, which in turn lead to increased knowledge.

The company grows by making previously unused company resources productive. The direction of growth also results from the specific nature of the resources.

"Unused productive services are, for the enterprising firm, at the same time a challenge to innovate, an incentive to expand, and a source of competitive advantage. They facilitate the introduction of new combinations of resources - innovation - within the firm. The new combinations may be combinations of services for the production of new products, new processes for the production of old products, new organization of administrative functions. "

- Penrose : The Theory of the Growth of the Firm

The management task for the growth of a company consists in exploiting unused resources and finding and integrating new resources (especially in the case of M&A). Since the management resource is also a specific resource and management is a specific productive service , the existing management resource limits the growth of the company. Therefore, it can be assumed that companies cannot realize several periods of accelerated growth in succession. This is known as the Penrose effect and has already been investigated in empirical studies.

reception

Virtually all schools of the resource-based view cite Penrose as their starting point. In the narrower sense, based on their approach, the ideas for the use of intangible assets (to be found in the balance sheet as an intangible asset ) from Itami and Roehl (1987), the core competency theory from Hamel and Prahalad (1990/94) and knowledge -based view (for example Spender 1994) and the resulting requirements for knowledge organization and knowledge management ( Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995).

Works

  • The Economics of the International Patent System. Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore 1951, ISBN 0-8371-6653-5 .
  • The Theory of the Growth of the Firm. John Wiley and Sons, New York 1959, ISBN 978-0-19-828977-7 .
  • The Growth of the Firm - A Case Study: The Hercules Powder Company. In: Business History Review. Volume 34, Spring 1960, pp. 1–23. (Publication of the dissertation)
  • The Large International Firm in Developing Countries: The International Petroleum Industry. Allen & Unwin, London 1968, ISBN 0-8371-8850-4 .
  • with Peter Lyon and others: New Orientations: Essays in International Relations. Frank Cass & Co., 1970, ISBN 0-7146-2593-0 .
  • with Ernest Penrose: Iraq: International Relations and National Development. Westview Press, Boulder 1978, ISBN 0-89158-804-3 .

literature

  • Steve Thompson, Mike Wright: Edith Penrose's Contribution to Economics and Strategy. In: Managerial and Decision Economics. Volume 26, No. 2, John Wiley and Sons, 1995, pp. 57-66.
  • Christos Pitelis (Ed.): The Growth of the Firm: The Legacy of Edith Penrose. Oxford University Press, 2002, ISBN 0-19-924416-2 .
  • Iman Seoudi, Matthias Huehn, Bo Carlsson: Penrose Revisited: A Re-Appraisal of the Resource Perspective. German University in Cairo, 2008. (pdf, engl.)

Single receipts

  1. ^ E. Penrose: The Theory of the Growth of the Firm. New York, John Wiley and Sons, 1959, p. 5.
  2. ^ E. Penrose: The Theory of the Growth of the Firm. 1959, p. 25.
  3. ↑ E. Penrose: The Theory of the Growth of the Firm. 1959, pp. 75-76.
  4. ^ E. Penrose: The Theory of the Growth of the Firm. 1959, pp. 85-86.
  5. ^ E. Penrose: The Theory of the Growth of the Firm. 1959, p. 85.
  6. ↑ see, for example, D. Tan, J. Mahoney: Examining the Penrose Effect in an international Business Context: The Dynamics of Japanese Firm Growth in US Industries. 2003, (pdf, engl.)
  7. ^ H. Itami, T. Roehl: Mobilizing invisible assets. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 1987.
  8. ^ G. Hamel, CK Prahalad: Competing for the future. Harvard Business School Press, Boston 1994.
  9. ^ I. Nonaka, H. Takeuchi: The knowledge creating company: How Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation. Oxford University Press, New York 1995.
    JC Spender: Organizational knowledge, collective practice and Penrose rents. In: International Business Review. Volume 3, 1994, pp. 353-367.

Web links

  • Obituary In: The Independent. October 19, 1996.
  • Obituary In: New York Times. October 21, 1996.
personal data
SURNAME Penrose, Edith
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Penrose, Edith Elura Tilton (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British economist
DATE OF BIRTH November 15, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH los Angeles
DATE OF DEATH October 11, 1996
Place of death Waterbeach , Cambridgeshire , UK