ABSTRACT
First of all, we take economics to be that social science which studies the employment, production and distribution of scarce resources which have competing uses. We take an ‘organisation’ to be a system of consciously co-ordinated activities of two or more persons explicitly created to achieve specific ends. 1 Both of these definitions are complex and full of problems. For immediate purposes, however, only a few clarifications are necessary. It is important to make clear that we are concerned with organisations of an intermediate kind, namely those below the level of national government but above that of the individual household or family. This principally means private firms, nationalised industries, local authorities and charitable and voluntary enterprises. Such organisations are all particularist. That is to say, within a given nation state they all pursue sectional interests in varying degrees. Together they account for most of our employment in Western societies, most of our physical production, a large part of our public and welfare services, and much of our social life. The resource allocating systems and behaviour of such intermediate organisations have traditionally been the lifeblood of micro-economics.
