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FOR philosophers the great existential question is: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” For management theorists the more mundane equivalent is: “Why do firms exist? Why isn’t everything done by the market?”
Today most people live in a market economy, and central planning is remembered as the greatest economic disaster of the 20th century. Yet most people also spend their working lives in centrally planned bureaucracies called firms. They stick with the same employer for years, rather than regularly returning to the jobs market. They labour to fulfil the “strategic plans” of their corporate commissars. John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company made him the richest man in America in the 1840s. But it never consisted of more than a handful of people. Today Astor’s company would not register as a blip on the corporate horizon. Firms routinely employ thousands of workers and move billions of dollars-worth of goods and services within their borders.
Why have these “islands of conscious power” survived in the surrounding “ocean of unconscious co-operation”, to borrow a phrase from D.H. Robertson, an economist? Classical economics had little to say about this question. Adam Smith opened “The Wealth of Nations” with a wonderful description of the division of labour in a pin factory, but he said nothing about the bosses who hired the pin-makers or the managers who organised them. Smith’s successors said even less, either ignoring the pin factory entirely or treating it as a tedious black box. They preferred to focus on the sea rather than the islands.

A. 어휘
existential 실존적인. management theorists 경영학 이론가들.
mundane 세속적인, 現世(현세)의. equivalent 相當語句(상당어구), 等値(등치).
central planning 중앙통제경제. bureaucracies 관료제도(주의).
stick with ...에 충실하다, 떠나지 않다. corporate 회사.
commissars 공산당의 통제위원, 인민위원. fur 毛皮(모피).
register 등록하다. blip 레이더 스크린의 영상. successors 후계자.
tedious 따분한.