No Ordinary Woman: The Life of Edith Penrose

"Edith Penrose was an American economist who spent most of her career in the United Kingdom and then in France. She was a business economist who researched how companies are organized. Her work was on multinationals and the oil industry in particular. She’s the sort of name I had vaguely heard of before, but again, this was a book I picked up slightly at random. It’s a really compelling life story. What’s interesting is that she’s almost faded out of economics. She was much better known in the 1970s because of the oil crisis and the development of multinationals. People knew her work then, but it has completely vanished and dropped off the radar. I think that’s partly because she was a female economist, and it’s always been a very male-dominated profession. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But it’s partly also because her approach was not very algebraic. She was working at a time when that became the thing that you did to be counted as a brilliant economist. She set up the economics department at SOAS, part of the University of London, but she ended up working in business schools rather than economics departments. More recently, economists have been rediscovering a lot of the things that she had found—in a non-mathematized way—about the organization of very large companies that operate across national boundaries. There’s not much about her economics in this particular book, but it sent me to her own book, which was called The Theory of the Growth of the Firm . This theorizing about why companies turn from normal, small companies into large conglomerates is what she was thinking about. I’ve been pondering this and did a talk about it here in Bristol last year. I think the really distinctive thing about economics—and maybe one or two other subjects, like philosophy and computer science—is that there’s a very narrow concept of what makes somebody brilliant. It’s about showy intellectual games of a certain kind and if you don’t do that, you don’t count. And I don’t think women can be asked to do that. It’s just stupid stuff, isn’t it? The insight you get from reading Edith Penrose’s book about the dynamic of firm growth is that it’s just as good as the later algebraic versions of the same thing. I guess it would be people like Oliver Williamson and that institutional tradition. He did some fantastic work and he deserved his Nobel Prize for it, but it’s not an enormous leap from what she was doing. That era was obviously diabolically bad for women academics. We complain now, but looking back, we shouldn’t. It’s a little better. You’re not expected to stop working when you get married. That’s progress."