P.W.S. Andrews' Revisited

Lowell Jacobsen

Review of Political Economy, 2017, vol. 29, issue 2, 190-208

Abstract: P.W.S. Andrews (1914–1971) was a remarkable industrial economist at Oxford University, prominently as a member of the Oxford Economists’ Research Group (OERG) and Nuffield College. In the final few years of his life, he held a professorship at Lancaster University. As a self-described ‘practical theorist’, Andrews thought economists, particularly in the 1930s, inappropriately extended Marshall in a more formal, technical manner whereby the detailed reality of industrial economics was overshadowed. Such a ‘methodological mistake’ of a priori reasoning trumping the inductive method was countered by the OERG’s emphasis on grounded empiricism featuring extensive primary research on real businesses. A product of this research was Andrews’ Manufacturing Business that proffers a novel theory of the business firm. This article revisits Andrews’ signature book, paying particular attention to its apparent curiously harsh reviews by Austin Robinson and Arnold Plant, two distinguished Marshallian industrial economists. Moreover, Manufacturing Business is considered as a possible precursor of business strategy, a nascent discipline in the 1960s.

Date: 2017
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DOI: 10.1080/09538259.2017.1311095

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