Reading Edith Penrose through the eyes of a labour economist1

Franck Bailly and Benjamin Dubrion

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2026, vol. 33, issue 1, 29-53

Abstract: Penrose’s book, The Theory of the Growth of the Firm has had considerable influence in academia. Nevertheless, it seems to have attracted little attention from labour economists. We argue that Penrose has something original to say about labour. The originality of her point of view is that she analyses labour productivity as being dependent on both the firm conceived as an organisation and on the representations or beliefs of the economic actors. This positioning gives rise to a particular conception of human resource management policies. It also gives rise to an understanding of work as a transformative activity for individuals.

Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09672567.2025.2460219 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:eujhet:v:33:y:2026:i:1:p:29-53

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/REJH20

DOI: 10.1080/09672567.2025.2460219

Access Statistics for this article

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought is currently edited by Richard Sturn, Hans Michael Trautwein, Muriel Dal-Pont-Legrand and Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay

More articles in The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().