There are not many books that are genuine classics, and only a handful in business and management whose insights and ideas last for 50 years and more. This book is one of the very few 'must reads' for anybody seriously interested in the role of management within the firm. Originally published in 1959, The Theory of the Growth of the Firm has illuminated and inspired thinking in strategy, entrepreneurship, knowledge creation, and innovation. Edith Penrose's tightly-argued classic laid the foundations for the resource based view of the firm, now the dominant framework in business strategy. She analyses managerial activities and decisions, organizational routines, and also the factors that inevitably limit a firm's growth prospects. For this new anniversary edition, Christos Pitelis has written a new introduction which both tells the story of Penrose's extraordinary life, and provides a balanced assessment of her key ideas and their continuing relevance and freshness.
2013 Reprint of 1959 American Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. This edition reprints the text from the 1959 First Edition originally published by Wiley. Why do some firms perform better than others? What enables a firm to grow and take advantage of its opportunities? Currently much discussion of these questions pivots around the ideas of competencies and capabilities, and the concept of the learning organization or knowledge-creating company. "The Theory of the Growth of the Firm" is a rich and pioneering work that addresses these questions and laid the foundation for this approach often referred to as the "resource based view of the firm." Edith Penrose analyzes managerial activities and decisions, organizational routines, and knowledge creation within the company and argues that they are critical to the ability of a firm to grow. This work has become a classic business book and remains relevant to this day.
Remarkably, a small fraction of firms account for most of the job and output creation in high-income and developing countries alike. Does this imply that the path to enabling more economic dynamism lies in selectively targeting high-potential firms? Or would pursuing broad-based reforms that minimize distortions be more effective? Inspired by these questions, this book presents new evidence on the incidence, characteristics, and drivers of high-growth firms based on in-depth studies of firm dynamics in Brazil, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, Thailand, Tunisia, and Turkey. Its findings reveal that high-growth firms are not only powerful engines of job and output growth but also create positive spillovers for other businesses along the value chain. At the same time, the book debunks several myths about policies to support firm dynamism that focus on outward characteristics, such as firm size, sector, location, or past performance. Its findings show that most firms struggle to sustain rapid rates of expansion and that the relationship between high growth and productivity is often weak. Consequently, the book calls for a shift toward policies that improve the quality of firm growth by supporting innovation, managerial skills, and firms’ ability to leverage global linkages and agglomeration. To help policy makers structure policies that support firm growth, the book proposes a new ABC framework of growth entrepreneurship: improving Allocative efficiency, encouraging Business-to-business spillovers, and strengthening firm Capabilities. This book is the third volume of the World Bank Productivity Project, which seeks to bring frontier thinking on the measurement and determinants of productivity to global policy makers. 'Policy makers often get carried away by the disproportionate contributions of high-growth firms to job and output growth and commit to pursuing policies targeting the potential ‘stars.’ This book separates fact from fiction underpinning such interventions through a comprehensive analysis of high-growth firms across a range of developing countries, making a compelling argument that public policy to pick prospective winners is neither possible nor desirable. Policy makers would be wise to consult its arguments and policy advice when designing the next generation of policies to support the growth of firms.' William R. Kerr Professor of Business Administration, Harvard University; author of The Gift of Global Talent: How Migration Shapes Business, Economy and Society 'How to ignite and sustain high firm growth has eluded both economic analysis and thought leaders in policy and business. Through its meticulous and thoughtful analysis, this important new book provides a tractable framework to guide policy to harness the growth and productivity potential of firms in the developing-country context.' David Audretsch Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute for Development Strategies, Indiana University .
Measuring Entrepreneurial Businesses: Current Knowledge and Challenges brings together and unprecedented group of economists, data providers, and data analysts to discuss research on the state of entrepreneurship and to address the challenges in understanding this dynamic part of the economy. Each chapter addresses the challenges of measuring entrepreneurship and how entrepreneurial firms contribute to economies and standards of living. The book also investigates heterogeneity in entrepreneurs, challenges experienced by entrepreneurs over time, and how much less we know than we think about entrepreneurship given data limitations. This volume will be a groundbreaking first serious look into entrepreneurship in the NBER's Income and Wealth series.
Research into firm growth has been accumulating at a terrific pace, and Alex Coad s survey of this multifaceted field provides a detailed, comprehensive overview of the latest developments. Much progress has been made in empirical research into firm growth in recent decades due to factors such as the availability of detailed longitudinal datasets, more powerful computers and new econometric techniques. This book provides an up-to-date catalogue of empirical work, as well as a coherent theoretical structure within which these new results can be interpreted and understood. It brings together a large body of recent research on firm growth from a multidisciplinary perspective, providing an up-to-date synthesis of stylized facts and empirical regularities. Numerous empirical findings and theories of firm growth are also surveyed and compared in order to evaluate their validity. Drawing on a vast and diverse body of research, this book will prove invaluable to students, academics, policy makers and practitioners with a need to keep abreast of studies in industrial organization, firm growth and management.
This textbook familiarises students with the theory and practice of small business management and challenges assumptions that may be held about the way small business management can or should adopt the management practices of larger firms. For students interested in establishing and managing their own small firm, this book helps them to focus their thinking on the realities of life as a small business owner-manager – both its challenges and its rewards. For postgraduate students that are keen to ‘make a difference’, this text enables them to understand how they might consult to small firms and assist owner-managers to establish and grow their ventures. In addition to students, this book is also useful to small business owner-managers as a general guide on how they might better manage their operations. Managers in large corporations and financial institutions who deal with small businesses as clients or suppliers, and professionals such as accountants, lawyers and consultants who provide advice and other services to small businesses will also find the book of interest.
Small Firm Growth comprehensively reviews the empirical literature on small firm growth to highlight and integrate what is known about this phenomenon and take stock of what past experiences of researching this area implies for how the phenomenon can or should be studied in future research.
Business firms around the world are experimenting with new organizational designs, changing their formal architectures, their routines and processes, and their corporate cultures as they seek to improve their current performance and their growth prospects. In the process they are changing the scope of their business operations, redrawing their organization charts, redefining the allocation of decision-making authority and responsibility, revamping the mechanisms for motivating and rewarding people, reconsidering which activities to conduct in-house and which to out-source, redesigning their information systems, and seeking to alter the shared beliefs, values and norms that their people hold. In this book, John Roberts argues that there are predictable, necessary relationships among these changes that will improve performance and growth. The organizations that are successful will establish patterns of fit among the elements of their organizational designs, their competitive strategies and the external environment in which they operate and will go about this in a holistic manner. The Modern Firm develops powerful conceptual frameworks for analyzing the interrelations between organizational design features, competitive strategy and the business environment. Written in a non-technical language, the book is nevertheless based on rigorous modeling and draws on numerous examples from eighteenth century fur trading companies to such modern firms such as BP and Nokia. Finally the book explores why these developments are happening now, pointing to the increase in global competition and changes in technology. Written by one of the world's leading economists and experts on business strategy and organization, The Modern Firm provides new insights into the changes going on in business today and will be of interest to academics, students and managers alike.
Firm growth. This concept has interested researchers for generations. Economists have sought to predict and measure firm growth using a host of different variables, while strategic management scholars depict growth as the result of clever analyses and rational resource exploitation. Entrepreneurship scholars - ever engrossed by successful start-ups - have pondered why growth sometimes comes fast and sometimes never at all, while the field of business history has given countless examples of growing firms in a range of different settings. Yet despite research across fields, our knowledge of how growth in a firm actually comes about is limited and we still know little about the process. This book offers a new reading of economist Edith Penrose’s The Theory of the Growth of the Firm. The bold statement is that although Penrose’s work - across fields and generations - is amongst the most quoted on firm growth, the basic points of her work have yet to be realized and explored empirically. Essentially, growth is created by a dynamic interrelation between the firm’s self-conception and its image of context. Based on these two subjective categories, the firm makes decisions and its actions lead it to develop along a particular path. To Penrose this is the basic engine that drives the growth and development of firms. This book discusses how the engine of firm growth can be captured in empirical analysis using interpretative theory and narrative methods inspired by recent streams of research in business history.
Defining an organization by its growth strategy enables business leaders to make better decisions about the ways their companies compete. Anjan Thakor's four categories of growth, which he arranges into the Competing Values Framework, delivers methods for developing strategies grounded in internal cultures and industry goals. Written for professionals, this book provides easy access to concepts in fields as diverse as corporate strategy, finance, organizational behavior, change management, and leadership. - Teaches ways to formulate a growth strategy and implement it through simple organizational interventions - Provides an intuitive framework and common language about growth strategies - Teaches readers how an effective growth strategy can boost stock price - Readers learn what kind of growth strategy will maximize the value of an organization - Readers with varied functional backgrounds can understand these concepts
