The Corporate Instinct

Abstract

‘Whatever might be the natural effects of unchecked competition, business has evidently developed checks sufficient to protect its necessary earnings, taking good and bad years together.’¹ ‘Since unchecked competition is suicidal and cannot continue, can anything continue which deserves the name of competition? … The answer appears to be that business rivalry still exists, subject to checks in the way of understandings and standards of fair tactics, enforced partly by the group ethics of the business community, partly by a lively sense of the need of common self-preservation, which is at the bottom of a deal of the group ethics, and partly by the discipline exercised by the larger and stronger concerns.’²