Search results

The central focus of this paper is the mentorship relationship of economist Fritz Machlup and his graduate student Edith Penrose, and specifically how that relationship contributed both to her development as a scholar and to her seminal work, The Theory of the Growth of the Firm.

The qualitative research on which this paper is based is the sociohistorical biographical approach, based on a close examination of published works and archival materials. Content analysis is used to draw inferences about Fritz Machlup's mentoring content, style, and impact on Penrose's methodology and argumentation as reflected in The Theory of the Growth of the Firm, and the correspondence exchanged while Penrose was writing The Theory of the Growth of the Firm.

The Theory of the Growth of the Firm mirrors Machlup's methodology and methodological framework. The arguments supporting Penrose's theoretic model of the growth of firms were discussed, debated and shaped by the exchange of ideas in the Penrose/Machlup correspondence.

While Penrose's work has been acknowledged as “breakthrough” in the areas of entrepreneurship and firm growth, there has been little recognition of the role of her mentor in its creation. This study sets out to correct what would appear to be an historical oversight as well as to understand how Machlup practiced mentorship; how he perceived the roles of mentor and mentee; Machlup's contribution to his graduate students, and the extent to which his students incorporated the learning into their own work.

This article investigates personal value systems in Iraq, in a sample of managers. The results indicate that the dominant values are those that compose the outward‐directed category: tribalistic, conformist and socio‐centred. In comparison American managers score high on manipulated values and the inner‐directed category is dominant. The results are discussed in relation to changes in Iraqi society and the functions of management.

This paper aims to bring to the fore the importance of feminist epistemologies in the history of the organization of management studies since the 1980s by following various intellectual moves in the development of feminist theorizing as they cross over to organization studies, including their analytical possibilities for reclaiming historically the voices of major women scholars, especially in doctoral seminars. The paper narrates these epistemological activities by mobilizing and reconsidering from the past to the present, the notions of “unmuting,” “mutating” and “mutiny.” It ends in a reflection addressing the state of business schools at present and why the field of organization and management studies needs “mutiny” now.

The paper adopts a narrative approach in which the voices of its authors appear to be central as they consider and reconsider over time their understanding of “unmuting,” “mutation” and “mutiny” as notions with analytical potential. This approach is influenced by Foucault’s “history of the present” but with contingencies brought about by feminist interpretations. The application of these notions is demonstrated by reclaiming and clarifying the epistemological underpinning in the works of three major women scholars as included in a doctoral seminar: Mary Parker Follett, Edith Penrose and Rosabeth Moss Kanter. These notions are further redeployed for their potential in institutional applications.

At present, the findings are discursive – if they can be called so, but the main motivation behind this writing is to go beyond discourse in the written sense, and to mobilize other activities, still in the realm of epistemological and scholarly work. These activities would legitimize actual interventions for changing business schools from their current situation as neoliberal entities, which mute understanding of major problems in the world, as well as the voices of most humans and non-humans paying for the foibles of neoliberalism.

The paper demonstrates the necessity of developing approaches for interventions in knowledge producing institutions increasingly limited by neoliberal premises in what can be said and done as legitimate knowledge. In doing this, the paper articulates the importance of keeping history alive to avoid the increasing “forgetfulness” neoliberalization brings about. The paper, in its present form, represents an active act of “remembering”.

This essay explores evolutionary and competence‐based theories of the firm. Evolutionary theories can be regarded as a subset of a wider class of theories, variously described as “capabilities”, “resource‐based”, or “competence‐based” theories of the firm. These contrast with a different set of contractarian theories, emanating largely from the work of Coase. It is argued that the contractarian theories of the firm misleadingly assume given individuals thus neglecting processes of individual learning and transformation. Similarly underestimated is importance of technology and the persistence of variety in firm structure and performance. The genesis of the alternative, competence‐based approach is outlined, including the important subset of “evolutionary” approaches of the Nelson‐Winter type. The paper concludes with a discussion of the relevance of the competence‐based approach to strategic management.

It is hypothesised that the phenomenon of increasing returns and economic progress may only be consistently explained by employing the epistemological paradox, that where knowledge is part of the system, knowledge about the system necessarily and inescapably changes the system itself. Accordingly, one expects to find the principle of increasing returns embodied in the theoretical writing about increasing returns. This is shown by an exemplary reading of the works of Young and Penrose.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework to explain the firm growth process based on an integration and extension, through empirical research, of Penrose’s theory of the growth of the firm and the resource-based view. Theoretical development within the firm growth literature has been noticeably limited. Firm growth studies use different theoretical bases and what is needed is integration of multiple theories and empirical testing of these to form a new conceptual framework capable of explaining the modern growth process fully.

The key perspectives are critically reviewed and integrated and empirical qualitative research is undertaken analysing the process of growth in two firms. Semi-structured interviews, participant observation and analysis of company documentation are utilised.

The key insight this research provides is detailed information with regard to which resources, mediators and outputs are vital to firm growth, how they need to be developed and why this is the case. The study shows that these act in a cyclical nature to enable firm growth and development.

These findings could be used by practitioners to determine which part of the conceptual framework requires the most amount of improvement and which are developed to an acceptable state, enabling them to make plans for the achievement of growth.

This research is able to reconceptualise two dominant theoretical perspectives resulting in the generation of a new firm growth framework, thereby addressing a distinct gap in the firm growth literature.

This chapter explores the origins of the theme of competitive advantage in 19th and early 20th century economics. This theme, which forms the core of modern Strategic Management, was a battleground for debates about the value of abstract theory versus observations about real-life events. Intellectual genealogies, citations, and other sources show the central roles played by the University of Vienna and Harvard University. These two institutions strongly influenced the theory of monopolistic competition as well as all three modern views of competitive advantage – the industrial as expressed by Porter, the resource-based as expressed by Penrose, and the evolutionary as expressed by Schumpeter.

While the social sciences do not make “scientific discoveries” of the kind made in the natural sciences, the empirical patterns revealed in Tables 1a and b struck us as coming close to that. Consider especially the “organic as percent of total” columns. They show an astonishingly clear and strong relationship between the size class of firms and the proportion of total growth that is organic. The effect is actually so strong that large firms defined as “high growth” in terms of total employment growth actually shrink quite markedly in organic terms (cf. Davidsson, 2005, p. 153; Davidsson & Delmar, 2006).