ABSTRACT
I NDUSTRIAL problems in America and Britain today appear from so many angles, at so many levels and in so many directions that their pursuit without a regular path will soon become lost in details. In this book the pathway is the logic, based on the technical characteristics of different industries, which underlies the varying but often measurable surface features of industrial structure and government. If we are actually to measure these features-and not just to argue from abstract and possibly unreal assumptions-there are several ways of approach. The approach adopted here begins with the visible social structures, the factories and the firms, and the bodies of persons of which they are constituted, and observes the pattern and behaviour of these specific structures accurately before beginning to speak of patterns and behaviour, models, or functions in the abstract. The nature and need of this approach must be explained a little further.
