The Theory of Business Enterprise is an economics (or political economy) book by Thorstein Veblen, published in 1904, that looks at the growing corporate domination of culture and the economy. Summary At its heart, The Theory of Business Enterprise is an analysis of two intertwined but clashing motivations: that of business and that of industry. Business is the making of profits; industry (or the "machine process") is the making of goods. "The captains of industry" (i.e., capitalists or "robber barons") curtailed production in order to keep prices and profits high. The worst fears of businessmen was a "free run of production" which would essentially collapse all profits. The book was published at a high point of American concern with business combinations and trusts. Veblen employed his evolutionary analysis to explain these new forms. Veblen placed the large business concerns in the context of the increasing industrialization of American life. Veblen asserted that, even though there is a commercial need for industry, the machine process has outrun commercial needs and has penetrated every corner of mechanical industries. This process is characterized by the obligation for standardization, certainty and quantitative accuracy and precision. The growth of industrial processes was certainly conquering the small business firms that had evolved earlier to organize craft production on a disjointed and small scale. Prior to these industrial concerns the only businesses that required significant investments were in shipping across oceans. And the only organizations with a pure business motivation were banking and merchant firms who dealt mainly with loaning, buying and selling. The need for stability, certainty and uniformity of the industrial era, however, also clashed with modern commercial interests. Where industrial processes are the concerns of engineers and their quest for precision, businessmen are motivated solely by pecuniary gain through purchase and sale. While businessmen certainly represent an older order, in the new order, businessmen are able to leverage the machine process for pecuniary gain even if it means undermining the smooth functioning of the machine process. It is not true, claims Veblen, that business interests coincide with that of the community. In fact, they may be opposites as business engages significantly in "competitive selling" through advertising, buying, selling and charging what the market will bear. Businessmen pay the wages of those engaged in competitive selling, such as salesmen, buyers, accountants and such, "not because their work is productive of benefit to the community, but