Учебно-методическое пособие для подготовки к экзамену по английскому языку (для студентов экономических специальностей). Бегун Н.В - 9 стр.

                          Text 2                                                  The operations of the divisions have been rationalised, reducing the re-
           STRUCTURE OF THE BUSINESS ENTERPRISE                                   sources and manpower required to achieve a given output. Unprofitable ac-
                                                                                  tivities have been disposed of by many of these groups by running them
        The typical large business enterprise of today in the United Kingdom
                                                                                  down, by sale to a former competitor within a jointly-owned subsidiary, as
consists of a small number of interrelated public companies and numerous
                                                                                  in the case of the merger between AEI-Hotpoint and the EMI domestic ap-
private companies, overall control being vested in a parent company hold-
                                                                                  pliance businesses.
ing a majority of the equity of its subsidiaries. Reasons for the proliferation
                                                                                          Many large British businesses have built up small specialist staff de-
of companies within a business enterprise are many, including a desire to
                                                                                  partments at group level which enable group operating managers to exercise
keep entirely separate types of business apart under specialised manage-
                                                                                  adequate control over operating subsidiaries. The accelerating use of elec-
ments, historic factors such as acquisition of other companies, and tax com-
                                                                                  tronic data-processing machines, both in the number and in the complexity
plications.
                                                                                  of problems handled, will allow group managements to exercise more and
        There has been a greater tendency in the United Kingdom than in the
                                                                                  more exact overall control of the performance of operating responsibility to
United States or Germany for the large-scale business enterprises to consist
                                                                                  divisional and factory level.
of a number of diversified businesses each operating on a medium scale
                                                                                          Parent boards of the major joint-stock companies are responsible
rather than for there to be a massive aggregation of economic power within
                                                                                  mainly to themselves. Overall control usually rests with a dominant person-
a narrow range of industry, as for instance in the American or German steel
                                                                                  ality among their number who controls or guides the overall strategy of the
and engineering industries. Moreover, when a new business has been ac-
                                                                                  group.
quired by a take-over bid, management has often been retained whilst the
new owners have exercised only general supervision over its affairs.
                                                                                                                        Text 3
        Many British operating managements consist of boards of directors
of subsidiary companies responsible to a parent board which controls major               With a difficult agenda of this kind, and given also the very serious
capital expenditure and demands a minimum standard of financial perform-          short-term problems which affected the British economy in the early post-
ance. The performance of the subsidiary may well be known only to the             war years, it is not surprising that the subject of economic growth was com-
financial executives of the group may have little knowledge of the composi-       paratively neglected.
tion of the business of which they are the legal owners. Most shareholders               There were also other factors which contributed to this result. First,
have too small a share of the equity to influence decisions of the manage-        the rates of growth which seemed reasonable at the time appeared rather
ment whilst, so far, large institutional shareholders have chosen to exert        unglamorously low: it was commonly assumed that the British economy
little influence. Moreover, because of the size and complexity of the group,      would continue to grow at something close to what was believed to be pre-
the parent board and its specialist advisers may well have only a sketchy         war rate of growth of output per man, of 1½ per cent per annum.
knowledge of the efficiencies of operation of individual subsidiaries.                   A second additional factor was that some of the main determinants of
        Over the past few years growing competition in home and foreign           growth – in particular, population growth and technical progress – were
markets and narrowing profit margins have caused many of the large British        often held or assumed to be largely unamenable to explanation in terms of
industrial groups to examine and to business consultants of British and           economic variables. Thus in the systems of thought or models which
American origin have been retained to advise on remedial measures. As a           economists used as their intellectual frames of reference, these determinants
result of investigations by consultants, and a group's own specialist officers,   of growth were often treated as something which had to be taken into ac-
there has been much reorganizations of the structure of large British busi-       count – at any rate in a long-term view – but which it was not necessarily
nesses in recent years, most noticeably in electrical engineering, oil and        the responsibility of the economist to analyse or account for. In technical
chemical companies. Many groups have organised themselves into a num-             language, they were treated as exogenous rather than endogenous variables.
ber of separately accounting divisions, each dealing with and coordinating               Finally, during the first five to ten years after the war, attention was
activities in one of the major business fields in which the group operates.       to some extent distracted from the analysis of economic growth, not merely
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