Page:Theory of Business Enterprise, The (Veblen).djvu/31

18 So much is clear, that the keeping of the balance in the comprehensive machine process of industry is a matter of the gravest urgency if the productive mechanism is to proceed with its work in an efficient manner, so as to avoid idleness, waste, and hardship. The management of the various industrial plants and processes in due correlation with all the rest, and the supervision of the interstitial adjustments of the system, are commonly conceived to be a work of greater consequence to the community's well-being than any of the detail work involved in carrying on a given process of production. This work of interstitial adjustment, and in great part also the more immediate supervision of the various industrial processes, have become urgent only since the advent of the machine industry and in proportion as the machine industry has advanced in compass and consistency.

It is by business transactions that the balance of working relations between the several industrial units is maintained or restored, adjusted and readjusted, and it is on the same basis and by the same method that the affairs of each industrial unit are regulated. The relations in which any independent industrial concern stands to its employees, as well as to other concerns, are always reducible to pecuniary terms. It is at this point that the business man comes into the industrial process as a decisive factor. The organization of the several