A business (also known as enterprise or firm) is an organization engaged in the trade of goods, services, or both to consumers. Businesses are predominant in capitalist economies, where most of them are privately owned and administered to earn profit to increase the wealth of their owners. Businesses may also be not-for-profit or state-owned. A business owned by multiple individuals may be referred to as a company, although that term also has a more precise meaning.
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 to mean a particular organization; the generalized usage to refer to a particular market sector, "the music business" and compound forms such as agribusiness; and the broadest meaning, which encompasses 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 and complexity of meanings.
Read more about Business: Basic Forms of Ownership, Classifications, Management, Organization and Government Regulation
Other articles related to "owned, business":
... acquisition, the next step was forming an in-house distribution arm for the co-owned labels ... by his own admission 'burnt out' after twenty years in the business ... Up to this point the Warner owned record companies had relied on licensing deals with local record labels to manufacture, distribute and promote its ...
Famous quotes containing the words owned and/or business:
“I was a closet pacifier advocate. So were most of my friends. Unknown to our mothers, we owned thirty or forty of those little suckers that were placed strategically around the house so a cry could be silenced in less than thirty seconds. Even though bottles were boiled, rooms disinfected, and germs fought one on one, no one seemed to care where the pacifier had been.”
—Erma Bombeck (20th century)
“I am not going to have 2,000 condoms hanging in my window. I don’t care what it represents.”
—Sharon Zuckerbrod, U.S. business executive. As quoted in Newsweek magazine, p. 23 (November 20, 1989)