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Globalization, Development, and History in the Work of Edith Penrose
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 May 2011
Abstract
Edith Penrose's work on the multinational enterprise and the political economy of globalization and development is assessed as it relates to her views on business history. This essay was written on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Penrose's classic 1959 book and her 1960 prize-winning paper on Hercules Powder, which was published in the Review. Penrose came close to providing a theory of “internalization,” compared foreign direct investment to market-type contracting relations, and even discussed transaction costs–related arguments. However, she largely accepted the existence of fi rms and did not examine why firms exist vis-à-vis alternatives, such as markets. Her views on the political economy of globalization, relations between multinational enterprise and the state, and development have proved to be incisive, mostly accurate, and ahead of their time.
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References
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88 Penrose, “International Economic Relations and the Large International Firm,” 116. Penrose returned to the issue of interfirm cooperation in The Theory of the Growth of the Firm, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1995)Google Scholar and in “Growth of the Firm and Networking,” in International Encyclopaedia of Business and Management (London, 1996)Google Scholar. She also dealt with this issue in her last published paper, “Strategy/Organization and the Metamorphosis of the Large Firm,” Organization Studies 29, no. 8/9 (2008): 1117–24. In these papers she makes the point that interfirm cooperation blurs the boundaries of the firm and may be calling for a more novel framework/theory.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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90 Jones and Khanna, “Bringing History (Back) Into International Business.”
91 Ibid.
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