This `goldmine of concepts for understanding business and industrial organization' was originally published in 1959 but had a powerful influence on economists and business strategists ever since. The author combines rigorous theory with close observation of the real business world, and writes simply but with an original approach. Her focus on teams and organizational knowledge underlines contemporary discussion of 'organizational competences' and she has written a new introduction which assesses the book's impact and describes the subsequent development of her own ideas.

Edith Penrose has been one of the most significantas economists of the second part of the twentieth century. Her contribution to the theory of the firm has reinvented and productively developed the classical tradition in economics, and informed the currently dominant, knowledge-based theory of
the firm. This volume builds on a special issue of Contributions to Political Economy that celebrated forty years since Penrose's classic The Theory of the Growth of the Firm. It includes fifteen chapters by leading contributors on the aforementioned aspects of Penrose's work.