In microeconomics, economies of scale are the cost advantages that enterprises obtain due to their scale of operation, and are typically measured by the amount of output produced per unit of time. A decrease in cost per unit of output enables an increase in scale that is, increased production with lowered cost. At the basis of economies of scale, there may be technical, statistical, organizational or related factors to the degree of market control.
Management is the administration of organizations, whether they are a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government body through business administration, nonprofit management, or the political science sub-field of public administration respectively. It is the process of managing the resources of businesses, governments, and other organizations.
An organization or organisation, is an entity—such as a company, or corporation or an institution, or an association—comprising one or more people and having a particular purpose.
Industrialisation (UK) or industrialization (US) is the period of social and economic change that transforms a human group from an agrarian society into an industrial society. This involves an extensive reorganisation of an economy for the purpose of manufacturing. Industrialisation is associated with increase of polluting industries heavily dependent on fossil fuels. With the increasing focus on sustainable development and green industrial policy practices, industrialisation increasingly includes technological leapfrogging, with direct investment in more advanced, cleaner technologies.
Economies of scope are "efficiencies formed by variety, not volume". In the field of economics, "economies" is synonymous with cost savings and "scope" is synonymous with broadening production/services through diversified products. Economies of scope is an economic theory stating that average total cost (ATC) of production decrease as a result of increasing the number of different goods produced. For example, a gas station primarily sells gasoline, but can sell soda, milk, baked goods, etc. and thus achieve economies of scope since with the same facility, each new product attracts new dollars a customer would have spent elsewhere. The business historian Alfred Chandler argued that economies of scope contributed to the rise of American business corporations during the 20th century.
Departmentalization refers to the process of grouping activities into departments. Division of labour creates specialists who need coordination. This coordination is facilitated by grouping specialists together in departments.
An economic system, or economic order, is a system of production, resource allocation and distribution of goods and services within a society. It includes the combination of the various institutions, agencies, entities, decision-making processes, and patterns of consumption that comprise the economic structure of a given community.
Alfred DuPont Chandler Jr. was a professor of business history at Harvard Business School and Johns Hopkins University, who wrote extensively about the scale and the management structures of modern corporations. His works redefined business and economic history of industrialization. He received the Pulitzer Prize for History for The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977). He was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He has been called "the doyen of American business historians".
John Edgar Thomson was an American civil engineer and industrialist. An entrepreneur best known for his leadership of the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) from 1852 until his death in 1874, Thomson made it the largest business enterprise in the world and a world-class model for technological and managerial innovation. Previously the railroad's first chief engineer, he became its third president.
The economic history of China describes the changes and developments in China's economy from the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 to the present day. The speed of China's transformation in this period from one of the poorest countries to one of the world's largest economies is unmatched in history.
Office management is a profession involving the design, implementation, evaluation, and maintenance of the process of work within an office or other organization, in order to sustain and improve efficiency and productivity.
Economic planning is a resource allocation mechanism based on a computational procedure for solving a constrained maximization problem with an iterative process for obtaining its solution. Planning is a mechanism for the allocation of resources between and within organizations contrasted with the market mechanism. As an allocation mechanism for socialism, economic planning replaces factor markets with a procedure for direct allocations of resources within an interconnected group of socially owned organizations which together comprise the productive apparatus of the economy.
The Pulitzer Prizes for 1978 are:
Managerialism is the idea that professional managers should run organizations in line with organizational routines which produce controllable and measurable results. It applies the procedures of running a for-profit business to any organization, with an emphasis on control, accountability, measurement, strategic planning and the micromanagement of staff.
Business history is a historiographical field which examines the history of firms, business methods, government regulation and the effects of business on society. It also includes biographies of individual firms, executives, and entrepreneurs. It is related to economic history. It is distinct from "company history" which refers to official histories, usually funded by the company itself.
Thomas Kincaid McCraw was an American business historian and Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, Emeritus at Harvard Business School, who won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for History for Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adams, Louis D. Brandeis, James M. Landis, Alfred E. Kahn (1984), which "used biography to explore thorny issues in economics."
Multi-divisional form refers to an organizational structure by which the firm is separated into several semi-autonomous units which are guided and controlled by (financial) targets from the center.
The Vanishing Hand theory is a concept first conceived of by economist Richard Normand Langlois. The term is an intentional play on both Adam Smith's invisible hand and Alfred Chandler's Visible Hand.
American business history is a history of business, entrepreneurship, and corporations, together with responses by consumers, critics, and government, in the United States from colonial times to the present. In broader context, it is a major part of the Economic history of the United States, but focuses on specific business enterprises.
Knowledge enterprise is a knowledge company. Variations of this name include knowledge-intensive company, organisation, or enterprise. However, the scope and origin of this terminology is unclear, according to D. Jemielniak. This term can be more readily defined by how much a company depends on knowledge, and how much that dependence plays a part in the company. There is no consensus on how dependent a company must be for it to be considered a knowledge company. However, there are some variations in knowledge companies, such as in the economy, in which there are two groups, one labor-intensive, and the other knowledge-intensive.
