Edith Penrose's "The theory of the growth of the firm" has offered key ingredients to an evolutionary approach to the growth of the firm. The entrepreneur enlivened by Edith Penrose in that book is revisited here, considering the role played by institutions in his decision-making. It is argued...

As Transaction Cost Economics evolved and entwined with the name of Oliver Williamson, it has absorbed a tension 'between an intuitive commitment to realism...and his commitment to some core presumptions of mainstream economics' [Hodgson 1998]. Most TCE scholars seem to rely on the latter...