1. The different types of legal-entity enterprises are well known.
The enterprises with which the sales of their suppliers (including employees and financiers) and the purchases of their customers are contracted, are for some in their own name and for others legal persons. To any contractual undertaking, because it is legally constituted, a sign is associated with a brand and, when it is a legal person, an enterprise name. It is not only "the house" with which sellers and buyers contract, but also the scope of a general management as well as the keeping of standardized general accounts.
2. The sales of a legal-entity enterprise are also, most often, those of enterprises within the enterprise.
As soon as an undertaking sells several supplies88, each homogeneous class of these supplies determines the existence of a de facto undertaking in the de jure undertaking. This observation is fully established after showing that to these classes belong directly a fraction not only of the sales of the contract enterprise, but also of the costs and assets of this same enterprise. First, it should be noted that the homogeneous classification of the supplies of a contractual enterprise is obtained by decomposition, going from the general to the specific until the inventory is exhaustive.
3. The enterprises in the enterprise form a tree of belongings.
In large-scale retail trade, as in many wholesale trades, the first level of breakdown is established between departments; the second level into departments within each department; the third level into families within each department; the fourth and last level into articles within each family. In any other contract enterprise, whether with fewer than four levels of decomposition or with more, a complete classification of this kind is used or will become used for the automated processing of management information. These classifications describe membership trees. In the example given, the sale of an item increases the sales of a family, a department, a department, and the contract enterprise to which these divisions belong.
4. Enterprises as legal-entities are also of the same affiliation.
Legal-entity enterprises belong to all the enterprises with which buyers and sellers contract. It is in this sense that their belonging is the same. Each enterprise in the enterprise also has the same belonging as its sisters – and they alone. According to the above terminology given as an example, two rays of different departments are not of the same belonging, as two families of two different departments and two articles of different families. For the reasons that will be explained in the rest of this chapter, the concept of identical belonging – same belonging – allows us to identify a general law of tendency. The reduction of profitability differentials, as a result of competition, between legal-entity enterprises is only the highest level of application of this law.
5. Let us call corporate service another component of the enterprise.
At the head of an enterprise is at least one person or body that may include, in addition to holding general meetings of members, a board of directors and its chairman as well as a general management and its first-rank delegates. At least part of this head constitutes a corporate service. Accounting, controlling, personnel administration, information technology and other functions are also often specializations, at least in their centralized parts, which are assumed by the same number of corporate services. In one way or another and for different purposes (setting margin targets, calculating unit costs), corporate service costs, often seen as "structural", must be distributed.
6. Let us call a workshop a third component often present in the structure of enterprises.
A constituent part of a contractual undertaking is likely to be neither an undertaking within the undertaking, because it is not the undertaking that sells, nor corporate services by the technical nature of what it produces. It sometimes takes the form of an entire plant, divisible into homogeneous cost sections. When it is internal to an enterprise within the enterprise, its costs are completely part of the direct expenses of the enterprise of which it is a division. When it provides several enterprises in the enterprise, its costs must be distributed.
7. From the present proposal to the end of this chapter, cost accounting and management control in enterprises have been the subject of a conceptual contribution which makes them more relevant.
By means of postulates held to be demonstrated without having been demonstrated89, petitions of principle have functioned as a general theory of the values of economic exchange. These constructions, which exclude the fact that all exchange values can only have in common that they are prices, have diverted from observation the full scope of in other words from the relation RPP'.