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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.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2011

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References

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2 With about 11,500 citations in Google scholar at the time of writing, The Theory of the Growth of the Firm is now one of the most cited books in the fields of economics, business, and management.

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30 Penrose, Growth of Firms, Middle East Oil, 49.

31 Ibid., 62.

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50 Ibid., 70.

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57 Penrose, “Problems Associated with the Growth of International Firms,” 82–90.

58 It is important to emphasize that my statements here come from an international business perspective. Economists have largely ignored Penrose and Hymer, even when dealing with the same issues and even when employing similar ideas. For example, economics-based theories of the MNE, such as Markusen, James R., Multinational Firms and the Theory of International Trade (Cambridge, Mass., 2002)Google Scholar, apply similar ideas to Hymer, in the context of formal models of the MNE. Hymer is rarely cited. See, for example, the review by Russ, Katheryn N., “The New Theory of Foreign Direct Investment: Merging Trade and Capital Flows,” International Finance 12, no. 1 (2009): 107–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Russ cites Hymer in a final draft, having failed to do so in earlier ones (an observation made by an anonymous reviewer of this article and incorporated here with gratitude). As Russ observes, “In the 1980s, it became the work of theorists like Ethier, Grossman, Helpman, Markusen and Razin to pinpoint exactly why FDI differs from the way Mundell and neoclassical growth models envisioned it, as it became clear that Hymer was right: FDI was increasing, but between rich countries and in tandem with intrafirm trade” (p. 108).

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69 Ibid, 39.

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71 Hymer, International Operations of National Firms.

72 Dunning and Pitelis, “Stephen Hymer's Contribution.”

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75 Ibid., 322.

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77 Penrose uses the term explicitly for the case of nations in an unpublished 1980 manuscript entitled “OPEC, Absorptive Capacity and Developing Countries,” Penrose Archive, Queens’ College, Cambridge. There she talks about “the absorptive capacity of the oil-exporting countries” (starting sentence, unpaged).

78 Penrose, “Economics and the Aspirations of Le Tiers Monde,” in Penrose, Growth of Firms, Middle East Oil, 333.

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87 Penrose, “Problems Associated with the Growth of International Firms,” 89.

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

89 Penrose, “International Economic Relations and the Large International Firm,” 117.

90 Jones and Khanna, “Bringing History (Back) Into International Business.”

92 See Wilkins, Mira, The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from 1914 to 1970 (Cambridge, Mass., 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Penrose, “Multinational Corporations”; Penrose, Theory of the Growth of the Firm; Chandler, “Organizational Capabilities and the Economic History of the Industrial Enterprise”; Pitelis, Christos N., “Edith Penrose's ‘The Theory of the Growth of the Firm’ Fifty Years Later,” in Penrose, Edith T., The Theory of the Growth of the Firm, 4th ed. (Oxford, 2009).Google Scholar

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