THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM
CHAPTER I
A BUSINESS
§1. Businesses are units of production, extractive, manufacturing, transport, trading, financial, professional, artistic, recreative, domestic.—§2. Businesses differ in (a) size, (b) relative importance of their factors, (c) ownership and control.—§3. Capital comprises buildings, machines and tools, fittings, fuel or power, materials, stock, money, some of which are 'fixed,' others 'circulating.' Land, labour, and management are treated as separate factors.
§1.—Most men are related to the business world in two ways: as workers they are attached to some particular business engaged in producing some special sort of goods or services; as consumers they are attached to general industry by a great number of suckers. In seeking to understand the industrial system a man is thus furnished with two approaches: his narrow concentrated interest as producer, his broad diffused interest as consumer. He learns at both ends, but his curiosity is more strongly and more constantly directed by what goes on in the little corner of the industrial world in which he earns his living, the business in which he is employed.
Turning his mind from the particular process on which he is mainly occupied, as a machine tender, a clerk, a labourer, a shop assistant, to what is taking place around him, he soon comes to get a grip of the main features of the structure of the business to which he 'belongs.'
Here is an employee in a shoe factory: he sees around him a number of other wage-earners, most tending some machine, others clerks in the office; there is the factory itself and the premises it occupies, the machinery and fittings, the stock of leather and shoes in various stages of production; lastly comes the management, summarised in the employer or 'boss.'
Such are the main ingredients of the business as he sees it encased in the four walls of the factory yard: in outline he comes to know how these ingredients are related, and he grasps the business as an organisation under the direction of the manager.
