Chapter 21: The Future of the Business Firm

The demonstrated ability of the business corporation to gradually adapt to shifting political, social, and economic forces is the key to its continuiing strength and resilience.

The corporation is likely to continue to be the dominant way of organizing economic activity in the developed wourld through the twenty-first century

Responding to a variety of new influences, the business corporation has gone through three stages of development: from the simple, competitve classical model of the nineteenth century to the managerial model of the first half of the twentieth century to the social environment model characteristic of the second halp of the twentieth century.

Three Models of Business Organization

The classical market model, in large measure the original concept of business organization, was based primarily on the British economy of the nineteenth century.

The managerial model was the next major development in terms of the fundamental approach to the organization and functioning of the business firm

The social environment model is the most recent of the three approaches to business behavior.


The Continuing Debate Over Government Authority and Private Power
In the broad sweep of American history, the transcendent ideological debate has been between the jeffersonian and Hamiltonian approaches to democracy: centralizing or decentralizing the location of power in society.

A New Policy Climate
A new policy climate for business may be takinig shape in the early twenty first century. It is an external environment less hospitable than that existing during the administration of Ronald Reagan.

source: Business and Government in the Global Marketplace (7 edition Murray L. Weidenbaum)