Vertical disintegration

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Vertical disintegration refers to a specific organizational form of industrial production. As opposed to vertical integration, in which production occurs within a singular organization, vertical disintegration means that various diseconomies of scale or scope have broken a production process into separate companies, each performing a limited subset of activities required to create a finished product.

Vertical integration When a company owns its supply chain

In microeconomics and management, vertical integration is an arrangement in which the supply chain of a company is owned by that company. Usually each member of the supply chain produces a different product or (market-specific) service, and the products combine to satisfy a common need. It is contrasted with horizontal integration, wherein a company produces several items which are related to one another. Vertical integration has also described management styles that bring large portions of the supply chain not only under a common ownership, but also into one corporation.

Filmed entertainment was once highly vertically integrated into a studio system whereby a few large studios handled everything from production to theatrical presentation. After the second world war, the industry was broken into small fragments, each specializing on particular tasks within the division of labor required to produce and show a finished piece of filmed entertainment. Hollywood became highly vertically disintegrated, with specialized firms who only performed certain tasks such as editing, special effects, trailers etc. Bell System divestiture had a similar effect on a larger industry later in the 20th century.

The studio system is a method of film production and distribution dominated by a small number of "major" studios in Hollywood. Although the term is still used today as a reference to the systems and output of the major studios, historically the term refers to the practice of large motion picture studios between the 1920s and 1960s of (a) producing movies primarily on their own filmmaking lots with creative personnel under often long-term contract, and (b) dominating exhibition through vertical integration, i.e., the ownership or effective control of distributors and exhibition, guaranteeing additional sales of films through manipulative booking techniques such as block booking.

Cinema of the United States Filmmaking in the USA

The cinema of the United States, often metonymously referred to as Hollywood, has had a large effect on the film industry in general since the early 20th century. The dominant style of American cinema is classical Hollywood cinema, which developed from 1917 to 1960 and characterizes most films made there to this day. While Frenchmen Auguste and Louis Lumière are generally credited with the birth of modern cinema, American cinema soon came to be a dominant force in the industry as it emerged. It produces the total largest number of films of any single-language national cinema, with more than 700 English-language films released on average every year. While the national cinemas of the United Kingdom (299), Canada (206), Australia, and New Zealand also produce films in the same language, they are not considered part of the Hollywood system. Hollywood has also been considered a transnational cinema. Classical Hollywood produced multiple language versions of some titles, often in Spanish or French. Contemporary Hollywood offshores production to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

One major reason for vertical disintegration is to share risk. Also, in some cases, smaller firms can be more responsive to changes in market conditions. Vertical disintegration is thus more likely when operating in volatile markets. Stability and standardized products more typically engender integration, as it provides the benefits of scale economies.

The geography of a disintegrated industry is not a given. Economic geographers typically differentiate between knowledge-intensive, volatile, unstandardized activities, and standardized, routinized production. The former tend to be clustered in space, as they require proximity to build a common conceptual framework and share new ideas. The latter can be far flung and are exemplified by global commodity chains such as apparel and automotive industries. Even in those industries however, design and other creative and non-repetitive tasks tend to exhibit some geographical clustering.

Economic geography has been defined by the geographers as the study of human's economic activities under varying sets of conditions which is associated with production, location, distribution, consumption, exchange of resources, and spatial organization of economic activities across the world. It represents a traditional subfield of the discipline of geography. However, many economists have also approached the field in ways more typical of the discipline of economics.

A number of commentators have remarked that in the Internet age commodity chains are becoming increasingly more transparent. The Wikichains.org project has adopted the same wiki technology used by Wikipedia in order to help make commodity chains more transparent. "They are a network of labour and production processes whose end result is a finished commodity". William Jones Esq.

A business cluster is a geographic concentration of interconnected businesses, suppliers, and associated institutions in a particular field. Clusters are considered to increase the productivity with which companies can compete, nationally and globally. In urban studies, the term agglomeration is used. Clusters are also important aspects of strategic management.

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Economies of scale the cost advantages that enterprises obtain due to size, throughput, or scale of operation, with cost per unit of output generally decreasing with increasing scale as fixed costs are spread out over more units of output

In microeconomics, economies of scale are the cost advantages that enterprises obtain due to their scale of operation, with cost per unit of output decreasing with increasing scale.

Industry production of goods or service of a given field within an economy

An industry is the production of goods or related services within an economy. The major source of revenue of a group or company is the indicator of its relevant industry. When a large group has multiple sources of revenue generation, it is considered to be working in different industries. Manufacturing industry became a key sector of production and labour in European and North American countries during the Industrial Revolution, upsetting previous mercantile and feudal economies. This came through many successive rapid advances in technology, such as the production of steel and coal.

Mass production production of large amounts of standardized products

Mass production, also known as flow production or continuous production, is the production of large amounts of standardized products, including and especially on assembly lines. Together with job production and batch production, it is one of the three main production methods.

Economies of agglomeration are cost savings arising from urban agglomeration, a major topic of urban economics. One aspect of agglomeration is that firms are often located near to each other. This concept relates to the idea of economies of scale and network effects.

In management, models of the learning curve effect and the closely related experience curve effect express the relationship between equation and efficiency or between efficiency gains and investment in the effort.

Marketing strategy is a long-term, forward-looking approach to planning with the fundamental goal of achieving a sustainable competitive advantage. Strategic planning involves an analysis of the company's strategic initial situation prior to the formulation, evaluation and selection of market-oriented competitive position that contributes to the company's goals and marketing objectives.

Post-Fordism is the dominant system of economic production, consumption, and associated socio-economic phenomena in most industrialized countries since the late 20th century. It is contrasted with Fordism, the system formulated in Henry Ford's automotive factories, in which workers work on a production line, performing specialized tasks repetitively, and in which his workers could afford the products they built. Definitions of the nature and scope of post-Fordism vary considerably and are a matter of debate among scholars. Changes in the nature of the workforce include the shift of emphasis to new information technologies and the rise of the service and the white-collar worker.

An organizational structure defines how activities such as task allocation, coordination and supervision are directed toward the achievement of organizational aims. Organizations need to be efficient, flexible, innovative and caring in order to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Organizational structure can also be considered as the viewing glass or perspective through which individuals see their organization and its environment.

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.

Alfred Weber German economist and sociologist

Alfred Weber was a German economist, geographer, sociologist and theoretician of culture whose work was influential in the development of modern economic geography.

A vertical market is a market in which vendors offer goods and services specific to an industry, trade, profession, or other group of customers with specialized needs. An example could be software that manages services in hotels—amenities solutions. It is distinguished from a horizontal market, in which vendors offer a non-specific, broad range of goods and services to a large group of customers with a wide range of needs, such as businesses as a whole, men, women, households, or, in the broadest horizontal market, everyone.

New trade theory (NTT) is a collection of economic models in international trade which focuses on the role of increasing returns to scale and network effects, which were developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Electronics manufacturing services (EMS) is a term used for companies that design, manufacture, test, distribute, and provide return/repair services for electronic components and assemblies for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). The concept is also referred to as electronics contract manufacturing (ECM).

Diamond model

Strategic analysis typically focuses on two views of organization: the industry-view and the resource-based view (RBV). These views analyse the organisation without taking into consideration relationship between the organizations strategic choice and institutional frameworks. The National Diamond' is a tool for analyzing the organization's task environment. The National Diamond highlights that strategic choices should not only be a function of industry structure and a firm's resources, it should also be a function of the constraints of the institutional framework. Institutional analysis becomes increasingly important as firms enter new operating environments and operate within new institutional frameworks.

Knowledge spillover is an exchange of ideas among individuals. In knowledge management economics, knowledge spillovers are non-rival knowledge market costs incurred by a party not agreeing to assume the costs that has a spillover effect of stimulating technological improvements in a neighbor through one's own innovation. Such innovations often come from specialization within an industry.

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.

Global Production Networks (GPN) is a concept in developmental literature which refers to "the nexus of interconnected functions, operations and transactions through which a specific product or service is produced, distributed and consumed."

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