A business (also called a company, firm and enterprise) is a legally recognized organization designed to provide goods and/or services to consumers. Businesses are predominant in capitalist economies, most being privately owned and formed to earn profit that will increase the wealth of its owners and grow the business itself. The owners and operators of a business have as one of their main objectives the receipt or generation of a financial return in exchange for work and acceptance of risk. Notable exceptions include cooperative enterprises and state-owned enterprises. Socialist systems involve either government agencies, public ownership, state-ownership or direct worker ownership of enterprises and assets that would be run as businesses in a capitalist economy. The distinction between these institutions and a business is that socialist institutions often have alternative or additional goals aside from maximizing or turning a profit.

The etymology of "business" relates to the state of being busy either as an individual or society as a whole, doing commercially viable and profitable work. The term "business" has at least three usages, depending on the scope — the singular usage (above) to mean a particular company or corporation, the generalized usage to refer to a particular market sector, such as "the music business" and compound forms such as agribusiness, or the broadest meaning to include all activity by the community of suppliers of goods and services. However, the exact definition of business, like much else in the philosophy of business, is a matter of debate.

Business Studies, the study of the management of individuals to maintain collective productivity to accomplish particular creative and productive goals (usually to generate profit), is taught as an academic subject in many schools.

Business is the "art" of making money by selling things or services people want for more than their cost. - Patrick Dixon

Sourced

• Nobody talks more of free enterprise and competition and of the best man winning than the man who inherited his father's store or farm.
  • C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951)

• You cannot Adhere to the teachings of the church on Sunday and not apply to the marketplace on Monday.
  • Archbishop LeRoy Bailey Jr senior pastor of The First Cathedral; From a sermon entitled: He Is Lord

• The chief business of the American people is business.
• Calvin Coolidge, Speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 17 January 1925

• However successful a man may be in his own business, if he turns from that and engages ill a business which he don't understand, he is like Samson when shorn of his locks his strength has departed, and he becomes like other men.
  • P. T. Barnum, ‘Beware of ‘‘Outside Operations’’’, The Art of Money Getting

• What I must understand is why someone will continue to get out of bed in the morning once they have all the money they could want. Do they love the business, or do they love the money?
  • Warren Buffett, ‘The Warren Buffett You Don’t Know’, Business Week article, July 5th 1999

• Business is other people's money.
  • Delphine de Girardin, Marguerites, Vol. ii.

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Thu Sep 3 18:10:15 2009