The Social and Political Effects of Concentration

Abstract

The economic effects of large-scale enterprise and industrial concentration have been the subject of extensive discussion, but the political and social aspects remain relatively neglected. This cannot be due to their lack of intrinsic significance. On the contrary the political and social ramifications of increasing scale are probably the most important, and some of the problems which large corporations create in the economic sphere may be better understood if we widen our analysis beyond the theory of markets to examine their impact on the internal organisation of the firm and its workforce and on political decision making in our ostensibly pluralist economy.