Mark Casson Conference

23 November 2012 at 12:07 pm Nicolai Foss Leave a comment

| Nicolai Foss |

Mark Casson is one of the most influential scholars in the international business and entrepreneurship fields. He is also living proof that huge influence can be won and held, not by regularly cranking out papers in the “A journals,” but by writing solid monographs. Although Casson has certainly written his share of high-level papers, he is arguably best known for two books, namely his slim 1976 monograph with Peter Buckley, The Future of the Multinational Enterprise, and his 1982 (single-authored) book, The Entrepreneur: an Economic Theory. While the former is one of the founding contributions to the theory of the multinational corporation (some say, the founding contribution), the latter was, at the time it was published, the perhaps most sophisticated economics-based treatment of entrepreneurship theory. I reread it about a year ago, and was struck by how up-to-date and fresh it still is. (Here is a brief popular statement of Casson’s views on entrepreneurship).

Professor Andrew Godley of the Henley Business School has put together an exciting conference (15-16. Dec., University of Reading) to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Casson’s book. The program includes luminaries such as Mike Wright, Saras Sarasvathy, Ram Mudambi and my former PhD student and colleague, Jacob Lyngsie. Unfortunately, I am not able to participate myself, but the conference should be of interest to the O&M readership. Here is the program.