One of the fundamental issues in organization and strategy research is identifying the factors that influence the development of firms over time. The current book introduces a new perspective regarding the firm development process - the Firm Growth Profile (FGP). We define the FGP as: a pattern of growth common to a cluster of firms that take similar actions while retaining a degree of idiosyncraticity. We assert that external factors limit variance in the way firms grow, hence firm development is not a purely idiosyncratic firm-level process, but rather an evolutionary process influenced by...