. .8 a 8a\'iDg of the costs of buaitiess management I and of the competitive costs of marketing products and services, rather than a saving in the prime I costs of production. The heightened facility and efficiency of the new and larger business combinations primarily affect the expenses of office work and sales, and it is in great part only indirectly that this curtailment and consolidation of business management has an effect upon the methods and aims of industry proper. It touches the pecuniary processes immediately, and the mechanical processes indirectly and in an uncertain degree. It is of the nature of a partial neutralization of the wastes due to the presence of pecuniary motives and business management, — for the business management involves waste wherever a greater number of men or transactions are involved than are necessary to the effective direction of the mechanical processes employed. The amount of " business " that has to be transacted per unit of product is much greater where the various related industrial processes are managed in severalty than where several of them are brought imder one business management. A pecuniary discretion has to be exercised at every point of contact or transition, where the process or ita product touches or passes the boundary between different spheres of ownership. Business transactions have to do with ownership and changes of ownership. The greater
BU8INES8 ENTEBPEISE
the parcelment in point of ownership, the greater the amount of business work thai baa to be done in connection with a given output of goods or services, and the slower, less facile, and less accurate, on the whole, is the work. This applies both to the work of bargain and contract, wherein pecuniary initiative and discretion are chiefly exercised, and to the routine work of accounting, and of gathering and applying information and misinformation.
The standardization of industrial processes, products, services, and consumers, spoken of in an earher chapter, very materially facilitates the