Business: Credo Reference

theory and practice of conducting large public and private dealings in money. Important institutions of private finance include those that deal with insurance, banking, stocks (see stock), bonds, and other securities. With the development of the national state, public finance—the management of the revenues, expenditures, and debts of the state—has been of great political, as well as economic, importance. The most important source of government revenue is taxes, but sale of public properties and franchises, as well as the sale of interest-bearing bonds, also contribute. Since the Korean War, a large part of governmental expenditures has gone for various military and defense needs. Other important areas of governmental expenditure are health, education, and welfare (the Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid programs); interest on the national debt; and public works. Important institutions of international finance are the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Monetary Fund.

Keeping records of business transactions, including summaries of assets and liabilities. The first examples of writing, and hence the first historical accounts, were found in Sumer and other areas of Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium BCE. These consisted of cuneiform characters engraved on clay tablets used for bookkeeping purposes in business transactions. From that time until the 15th century, accounting techniques were rudimentary, using basic listings, usually in chronological or geographical order, of business inputs and outputs, purchases, inventories, and other transactions all listed together. In 1494, the Franciscan Friar Luca Pacioli published the mathematics textbook Summa de arithmetica, geometrica, proportioni et proportionalita (Venice, 1494). Although this book contained mathematics as known in the 15th century, one chapter described the method used by Venetian merchants that we now call double-entry bookkeeping.

maintenance of systematic and convenient records of money transactions in order to show the condition of a business enterprise. The essential purpose of bookkeeping is to reveal the amounts and sources of the losses and profits for any given period. Proper bookkeeping should also reveal the nature and value of the assets and liabilities of a firm, as well as its net worth at the close of that period.

The rising significance of consumption (or consumer culture) in contemporary societies is often associated with the impact of advertising—the circulation of information and product endorsements that attempt to persuade people to consume particular goods and services. This is especially the case in the United States, which for many is the society that epitomizes consumer culture. Indeed, the omnipresence of advertising is widely recognized as one of the defining features of consumer culture.

Marketing identifies unfulfilled needs and desires and satisfies those needs and desires in the target market. Marketing entails an entire process that involves identifying opportunities in the market that have potential to make a profit, developing a new product, attracting the customer to the product or service, keeping the customers, building brand loyalty, and creating value for customers. Companies that do this well are successful marketers. Marketing is no longer just a department in a company; various departments work together to market a product or service. Nowadays marketing starts even before there is a product. It is effective only if the company is successful in delivering the promised value and satisfaction.

Branding is the process by which companies differentiate their products from their competition. In developing a unique identity, which may include a name, packaging and design, a brand is developed. In developing and managing this unique identity, the branding process allows organisations to develop strong emotional and psychological connections with a product, goods or service. This, in turn, eases the purchasing decision. Branding affects stakeholder perceptions and the marketing task is to ensure these perceptions are positive. The stronger the branding position, the higher the price you can charge for that product with a corresponding increase in sales volume.

The modern field of study concerned with production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. For centuries, political economists were also concerned with politics and sociology, but these subdisciplines have since spun off on their own within academia. Early economists were essentially concerned with the problem of scarcity, and thus with both private and public mechanisms by which decisions were made on the allocation of limited resources in what many saw as, and that for millennia actually was, a Malthusian world. Reflecting on this baleful reality, and the dreary conclusions and uneven social consequences of many economic observations and theories, such as those characterizing the beggar-thy-neighbor practices of mercantilism even under great finance ministers like Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Thomas Carlyle famously (though rather unfairly) called economics “the Dismal Science.”

Capitalism is an economic system characterized by private property and freely functioning markets without central planning. Prices in capitalist economic systems are determined by the free and open exchanges of buyers and sellers guided by self-interest but constrained by both an ethical consensus and the rule of law. While capitalism is widely viewed as the most effective system for generating wealth and higher material standards of living, capitalist economies also go through periods of instability, some of which have raised concerns about the overall appeal of the system.

Under normal capitalist conditions, the transportation and exchange of commodities for money. As such, trade provides a vital link between production and consumption in capitalist commodity chains. It is through trade that commodities reach their markets, and it is only when commodities are sold into markets that the value produced by the exploitation of workers is abstracted out and represented in the exchange values or prices generated by market trading (Harvey, 1999 [1982]). For these reasons, trade derives both its immense significance and considerable contemporary contentiousness from the ways in which it is interwoven with the wider political–economic organization of capitalism.

granting of goods, services, or money in return for a promise of future payment. Most credit is accompanied by an interest charge, which usually makes the future payment greater than an immediate payment would have been. The credit system is founded upon the lender's confidence in the borrower or in his collateral and general possessions. Credit may be classified according to the industry using it, its quality or liquidity, or the length of time for which it is extended. Basically there are two kinds, business and consumer. The chief function of business credit is the transference of capital from those who own it to those who can use it, in the expectation that the profit from its use will exceed the interest payable on the loan. Thus business credit increases the productive power of capital.

Broadly, the term refers to the directing and controlling of a group of people or entities, and the process used for the purpose of accomplishing a goal. During the early 20th century, Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933), who wrote on the topic, defined management as “the art of getting things done through people.”

In an organization, management combines both policy and administration and the people who provide the decisions and supervision necessary to implement the organization's objectives. An organization can be a business, school, city, or governmental entity.

In its broadest sense, human resource management is a widely used term coined to encapsulate management policies and practices concerned with the supply and utilization of the labor resource required for the firm to meet its commercial objectives. To do so, the employer has to be able to compete within the labor market and meet basic requirements of social legitimacy relevant to the society in which the firm is located. The employer needs to be able to attract and keep labor and ensure that labor power is utilized for productive purposes relevant to its business objectives. It is by no means certain how best to proceed in this endeavor. This uncertainty in the context of inevitable resource constraints—whether financial, cognitive, or the capacity for control—make both the meaning and practice of human resource management difficult and ambiguous.