On The Margins

(Masood Mortazavi)


(Books)(Blogger)(java.net)
Check Google Page Rank

20080817 Sunday August 17, 2008

[ Business ] Organizing Production

In his Contemporary Strategy Analysis, Robert M. Grant describes a more recent phase in the long evolution of economic organizations:

As late as 1840s, the largest enterprises in the US in terms of numbers of workers were agricultural plantations. Most manufacturing was organized through networks of self-employed, home-based workers. The English woolen industry consisted of home-based spinners who purchased raw wool (on credit) from a merchant to whom they sold the yarn; the merchant resold the yarn to home-based weavers from whom he purchased cloth. This "putting-out" system survived until the onset of the Industrial Revolution. With the advent of water-powered looms, weavers moved to factories where, initially, they rented looms from factory owner by the hour. Factory-based manufacture made this system of independent contractors inefficient—it was difficult to schedule machine time, and there was little incentive for the independent workers to look after their rented machines. The emergence of firms where market relationships among workers, machine owners, and merchants were replaced by employment relationships between the owner of capital and the workers was a more efficient means of organizing production.

The issue of relative roles of firms and markets is a central aspect of economic organization. In the capitalist economy, production is organized in two ways: in markets (by the price mechanism) and in firms (by managerial direction). The relative roles of firms and markets is determined by efficiency… 

2008-08-17 00:44:20.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

On the Margins Tag Cloud

america apache art berkeley blogs books business canada capital code communications community computing conference connectors content contribution corporate costs culture databases derby design desktop developers development economics education energy engineering film finance history information innovation international internet iran isfahan java java-db javaone law linux logic management markets mathematics media mobile music mysql netbeans networks news open open-solaris open-source opensolaris opensource os persian philosophy phones photography photos politics postgresql practice privacy products programming ruby science server services social society software solaris sports strategy sun sun-microsystems systems technology tehran telecommunications tools transactions transportation travel tv us video war web windows work writing

Del.icio.us

RSS Feeds

XML

All
/ Persian (فارسی)
/Announcements
/Art (هنر)
/Business
/Code
/Culture
/Design
/Economics
/Here
/History
/Java
/Mathematics
/Media
/Networks
/Papers
/Personal
/Philosophy
/Science
/Society
/Sports
/Sun Microsystems Inc.
/Technology
/Telecommunications
/This
/Web
/Work

Disclaimer

I work at Sun Microsystems. The opinions expressed here are purely my own, and neither Sun nor any other party necessarily agrees with them.

Coordinates

Locations of visitors to this page

« December 2009
SunMonTueWedThuFriSat
  
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
  
       
Today

www.flickr.com
This is a Flickr badge showing public photos from M.Mortazavi. Make your own badge here.

Entry Statistics

Entries: 1246
Comments: 919

Recent Entries

StatCounter

Statistics from StatCounter

Page Rank

Check Google Page Rank

On the Margins Tag Cloud

america apache art berkeley blogs books business canada capital code communications community computing conference connectors content contribution corporate costs culture databases derby design desktop developers development economics education energy engineering film finance history information innovation international internet iran isfahan java java-db javaone law linux logic management markets mathematics media mobile music mysql netbeans networks news open open-solaris open-source opensolaris opensource os persian philosophy phones photography photos politics postgresql practice privacy products programming ruby science server services social society software solaris sports strategy sun sun-microsystems systems technology tehran telecommunications tools transactions transportation travel tv us video war web windows work writing

RSS Feeds

XML

All
/ Persian (فارسی)
/Announcements
/Art (هنر)
/Business
/Code
/Culture
/Design
/Economics
/Here
/History
/Java
/Mathematics
/Media
/Networks
/Papers
/Personal
/Philosophy
/Science
/Society
/Sports
/Sun Microsystems Inc.
/Technology
/Telecommunications
/This
/Web
/Work

Other Places




Landmine Casulties
free counters'

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
© Masood Mortazavi
This is a personal weblog, I do not speak for my employer.