The Overall Framework

The keystone of modern industrial society is a large number of organizations whose principal occupation is to supply goods and/or services to their environment. In capitalist industrialized societies such organizations have been usually grouped into two major categories. One contains ‘for-profit’ business firms whose assets are owned by private individuals. The other is composed of ‘not-for-profits’ whose assets are publicly owned. Historically it has been assumed that the respective categories exhibit significantly different non-overlapping behaviors.