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Business and Politics: Toward a Theory Beyond Capitalism, Plato, and Marx
Danielsson, Christer
21/3  (Spring 1979): 17-25

The aim of this article is to try to fill the gap between business and society by presenting a model, based on an approach that might appear new. An enterprise, interrelating with its environment, forms a system, which consists of a very large number of elements. The laws which govern the composition and transformations of this structure are not reducible to one-by-one association of its elements, they confer on the whole. Applying this to one of the basic notions of a structure, the idea of wholeness, a more concrete diagram of the business-society situation can be produced. Here elements are grouped into four major subsystems, Consumers, users of goods and services, Laborers, workers, regardless of the color of the collar, Capitalists, those who control the means of production and the State, the bureaucrats, entrusted with the legislative, executive and judicial functions. Starting from this simple model and adopting a relational perspective, it is possible to illustrate some confrontations and alliances of importance for interrelationships between business and society, how they were formed and how they seem likely to evolve in the future.

 

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