We now have single corporate enterprises employing hundreds of thousands of workers, having hundreds of thousands of stockholders, using billions of … - Gardiner Means

In traditional economic writings dealing with the economy as a whole, it is usually assumed that prices are highly flexible and that economic adjustment is brought about through price changes. We are going to examine inflexible prices.

Earlier writers have recognized that economic activity is only in part trading and that the element of administration enters in, but they have tended to minimize this administrative aspect. The modern corporation has not only increased this aspect by bringing a greater part of economic activity within the administrative limits of single units, has altered the character of the market by making price not an outgrowth of trading but of administration.

Both... the separation of labor from control and of the owner from control... have made possible the continuing development of the size of the individual enterprise, have reduced the area within which economic processes is organized through the interplay of prices and have increased the area within which production is organized... and the coordination of production on a planned basis.