The Theory of Business Enterprise is a political economy book that looks at the growing corporate domination of culture and the economy. At its heart The Theory of Business Enterprise is an analysis of two intertwined but clashing motivations; that of business and that of industry. Business is the making of profits. Industry is the making of goods. "The captains of industry" curtailed production in order to keep prices and profits high. The worst fears of businessmen was a "free run of production" which would essentially collapse all profits. In this book, which was published in 1904 during the height of American concern with the growth of business combinations and trusts, Veblen employed his evolutionary analysis to explain these new forms. He saw them as a consequence of the growth of industrial processes in a context of small business firms that had evolved earlier to organize craft production. Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) was an American economist and sociologist. He is well known as a witty critic of capitalism. Veblen is famous for the idea of "conspicuous consumption." Conspicuous consumption, along with "conspicuous leisure," is performed to demonstrate wealth or mark social status. Veblen explains the concept in his best-known book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. Within the history of economic thought, Veblen is considered the leader of the institutional economics movement. Veblen's distinction between "institutions" and "technology" is still called the Veblenian dichotomy by contemporary economists.

This new edition of The Economics of Business Enterprise provides a comprehensive survey of the theory of the firm from the perspective of New Institutional Economics. It continues to emphasise the role of the entrepreneur within the firm and the emergence of institutional responses to rent seeking. Neoclassical, Transactions Cost, Austrian, Public Choice and Property Rights perspectives are contrasted and used to analyse private governance arrangements, contemporary developments in organisational form such as ‘the sharing economy’ and the regulatory framework.

Peter F. Drucker argues that what underlies the current malaise of so many large and successful organizations worldwide is that their theory of the business no longer works. The story is a familiar one: a company that was a superstar only yesterday finds itself stagnating and frustrated, in trouble and, often, in a seemingly unmanageable crisis. The root cause of nearly every one of these crises is not that things are being done poorly. It is not even that the wrong things are being done. Indeed, in most cases, the right things are being done—but fruitlessly. What accounts for this apparent paradox? The assumptions on which the organization has been built and is being run no longer fit reality. These are the assumptions that shape any organization's behavior, dictate its decisions about what to do and what not to do, and define what an organization considers meaningful results. These assumptions are what Drucker calls a company's theory of the business. The Harvard Business Review Classics series offers you the opportunity to make seminal Harvard Business Review articles a part of your permanent management library. Each highly readable volume contains a groundbreaking idea that continues to shape best practices and inspire countless managers around the world—and will have a direct impact on you today and for years to come.

If one thing catches the eye in almost all literature about (re)designing or (re)engineering of enterprises, it is the lack of a well-founded theory about their construction and operation. Often even the most basic notions like "action" or "process" are not precisely defined. Next, in order to master the diversity and the complexity of contemporary enterprises, theories are needed that separate the stable essence of an enterprise from the variable way in which it is realized and implemented. Such a theory and a matching methodology, which has passed the test of practical experience, constitute the contents of this book. The enterprise ontology, as developed by Dietz, is the starting point for profoundly understanding the organization of an enterprise and subsequently for analyzing, (re)designing, and (re)engineering it. The approach covers numerous issues in an integrated way: business processes, in- and outsourcing, information systems, management control, staffing etc. Researchers and students in enterprise engineering or related fields will discover in this book a revolutionary new way of thinking about business and organization. In addition, it provides managers, business analysts, and enterprise information system designers for the first time with a solid and integrated insight into their daily work.

This book summarises Mark Casson’s recent research on the multinational enterprise. This work is firmly rooted in history and examines the evolution of the internalisation theory of the multinational enterprise over the past forty years and, in the light of this, considers its potential for further development. The book also explores internationalisation theory in respect to marketing and brands, the supply chain, risk management as well as methodology.

In the past decades, social enterprise has been an emerging field of research. Its main frameworks have been provided by Occidental approaches. Mainly based on an organizational vision, they give little or no room to questions such as gender, race, colonialism, class, power relations and intertwined forms of inequality. However, a wide range of worldwide hidden, popular initiatives can be considered as another form of social enterprises based on solidarity, re-embedding the economy as well as broadening the political scope. This has been shown in a previous book: Civil Society, the Third Sector, and Social Enterprise: Governance and Democracy. Thus, to be more than a fashion or a fictitious panacea, the concept of social enterprise needs to be debated. Southern realities cannot be only understood through imported categories and outside modeled guidelines. This book engages a multicontinental and pluridisciplinary discussion in order to provide a pluralist theory of social enterprise. The book will be of interest to researchers, academics and students in the fields of social entrepreneurship, social innovation, development studies, management studies and social work.

The Oxford Handbook of the Corporation assesses the contemporary relevance, purpose, and performance of the corporation. The corporation is one of the most significant, if contested, innovations in human history, and the direction and effectiveness of corporate law, corporate governance, and corporate performance are being challenged as never before. Continuously evolving, the corporation as the primary instrument for wealth generation in contemporary economies demands frequent assessment and reinterpretation. The focus of this work is the transformative impact of innovation and change upon corporate structure, purpose, and operation. Corporate innovation is at the heart of the value-creation process in increasingly internationalized and competitive market economies, and corporations today are embedded in a world of complex global supply chains and rising state and state-directed capitalism. In questioning the fundamental purpose and performance of the corporation, this Handbook continues a tradition commenced by Berle and Means, and contributed to by generations of business scholars. What is the corporation and what is it becoming? How do we define its form and purpose and how are these changing? To whom is the corporation responsible, and who should judge the ultimate performance of corporations? By investigating the origins, development, strategies, and theories of corporations, this volume addresses such questions to provide a richer theoretical account of the corporation and its contested future.