Types of organizational structures cartel syndicate trust concern. Cartel - syndicate - trust - concern, conglomerate, transnational corporation

Cartel. Cartels are from Germany. A cartel is an association in which the participants of this association do not lose either industrial or commercial independence. The association occurs for (the purpose of the cartel):

ü Establishing a single price for products.

ü Uniform conditions for hiring workers are negotiated.

ü Establish production quotas

ü Agree on the division of sales markets.

Syndicate. Syndicate members lose their commercial independence. The production remains. All products manufactured by syndicate members are sold through syndicate offices. Often, syndicate offices buy raw materials for syndicate members if they can be bought at discounted prices. The birthplace of syndicates is France, and until 1917 - Russia.

Trust is joint-stock company. Participants lose both commercial and industrial independence. It is formed on the basis of the merger of several capitals (different owners) through the issuance of securities (shares and bonds), and these securities are distributed not only between the founders, but can also be freely sold on the stock market or other institutions. This also attracts the capital of the general population.

AO benefits:

All the affairs of the joint-stock company are solved with the help of founding meetings. All issues are resolved by voting. The decisive word belongs to the holder of a controlling stake (either 51% of the shares, or 50% + 1 share). In practice, it is enough to have from 15% of the shares.

A share is a security that gives its owner the opportunity, or the right, to receive certain income on it, or on it. The income that the owner of the shares receives is called dividends or dividends.

A bond is a security that gives you the opportunity to earn interest in the form of a percentage. The owner of the bond is the creditor.

Bond interest is paid first. Shares pay dividends last.

The birthplace of the trust is the USA.

Concern. Homeland - Japan.

It unites the enterprises of the most various industries industry, trade, transport, services, financial institutions.

The reason for the emergence of the concern is inter-industry competition.

The employees of the concern centrally perform the functions of management, supply, sale of goods, long-term planning, scientific and technical policy, and much more. As a rule, industrial enterprises have independence.

A concern is formed on the basis of the so-called. participation system, and is a pyramid, the links of which represent various enterprises.

All enterprises are interconnected, the so-called. a single technological chain.

In the 60s of the twentieth century, such associations began to appear in the United States that began to be called conglomerates. It was thought to be the fifth form of amalgamation, but most economists consider it to be a type of concern.

Arise on the basis of capital diversification. The conglomerate is less stable than the concern, because the conglomerate includes enterprises that do not have a single technological chain. Quickly arise, but also quickly disintegrate.

The main organizational forms of economic monopolies are as follows. Cartel- this is an association of several enterprises of the same sphere of production, the participants of which retain ownership of the means of production and the product produced, industrial and commercial independence, and agree only on the share of each in the total production volume, prices, markets.

Syndicate- this is an association of a number of enterprises in one industry, the participants of which retain ownership of the means of production, but lose ownership of the product produced, which means they lose their commercial independence. In syndicates, the sale of goods is carried out by a common sales office.

Trust- this is an association of a number of enterprises in one or more industries, the participants of which lose their ownership of the means of production and the product produced, i.e., industrial and commercial independence. They combine production, marketing, finance, management, and for the amount of invested capital, the former owners of individual enterprises receive trust shares, which give them the right to take part in management and appropriate a corresponding part of the trust's profit. Nowadays, cartels, syndicates, trusts have lost their significance and in their pure form almost never meet.

AT modern conditions based on the diversification of capital, new forms of monopolies are created - a diversified concern, a conglomerate, a consortium.

Diversified concern- this is an association of tens, even hundreds of enterprises of various industries, transport, trade, whose participants lose ownership of the means of production and the product produced, and the main company exercises financial control over other participants in the association.

Conglomerate- it's huge industrial complex, in which companies operating in different, technologically unrelated areas are concentrated under a single financial control. As a rule, conglomerates are owned by one firm and produce heterogeneous non-competitive goods at one or more stages of production or operate in market segments that do not intersect. Companies have a lot of autonomy. economic activity and their management is decentralized.

Consortium created on the basis of temporary agreements between several banks and industrial corporations for joint large-scale financial transactions or the implementation of production projects (placement of large loans, construction of sea canals, ports, pipelines, etc.). After the expiration general works the consortium breaks up. Characteristic features modern market are the association, interweaving, interpenetration of various organizational forms of monopolies, which indicates further development, deepening the processes of monopolization of the modern economy.

In order to maintain such an advantageous position in the market, monopolistic associations decisively crack down on competitors by economic and other methods. Let's describe some of these methods.

1. Economic boycott- partial or complete rejection of economic ties with outsiders (enterprises that are not part of a monopolistic association). Monopolies offer buyers dependent on them not to purchase goods from other firms, as they are supposedly of poorer quality.

2. Dumping- the deliberate sale of goods at bargain prices in order to ruin a competitor.

3. Limiting the sale of goods to independent (non-monopoly) firms (for example, reducing the supply of oil to refineries).

4. Price Maneuvering: The monopoly raises the prices of products sold to small proprietors and at the same time applies secret discounts and concessions in this regard to large buyers.

5. Usage financial resources struggle with competitors (for example, speculation securities on the stock market).

6. Destruction of competitors with the help of legal and illegal means with the aim of their "absorption" and "attachment" to the monopoly. The latter use a wide arsenal of cruel tricks: counterfeit competitors' products, infringe patents, copy commercial and brand names deceive consumers. Against their market opponents, many firms use "industrial espionage" (secretly find out production secrets, using electronic means, services of "defectors" from competitors' enterprises, etc.). Some monopolies do not disdain criminal methods, including arson, terrorist attacks and contract killings.

) cartel;

) syndicate;

) concern;

) financial and industrial group.

Cartel

This is an association of a number of enterprises in the industry, providing for an agreement on the establishment of monopoly high prices, the delimitation of sales markets, the establishment of a certain volume of production for the entire cartel as a whole and for its members in particular. The cartel refers to the early forms of monopoly. However, the cartel agreement did not concern the production and, moreover, the supply and marketing activities of the enterprise. They were given complete freedom to trade in those products that were not included in the cartel agreement, and therefore some enterprises received additional profits due to this. The production and commercial independence of the enterprises belonging to the concern is preserved.

Syndicate

is an association of enterprises, providing for the loss of its members of commercial independence. Sales of products are carried out by a single sales center of the syndicate. Uniform sales prices and the same conditions for the sale of goods, the procurement and receipt of raw materials, etc. are established. When, as a result of further mergers, enterprises lose their production independence and are managed from single center, then they form a trust.

Trust

Consolidation of enterprises with a complete loss of independence of the enterprises included in it.

Usually, a single-industry and combined, multi-industry trust is distinguished, when the association captures enterprises of another industry. A combined trust that unites enterprises from different industries gets the opportunity to derive additional profit, firstly, by using by-products and waste from another industry, and secondly, by organizing vertical combination, when one enterprise processes raw materials, another manufactures parts from it, the third turns them into commodities, and so on. A combined trust is a form of intermediate transition from trust to highest form monopolistic association - concern.

Concern

Consolidation of enterprises by establishing financial control over them through the purchase of a controlling stake. The enterprises included in the concern formally retain their legal independence. The concern is headed by a holding company (“parent company”) that owns controlling stakes in “subsidiaries”. In its turn, affiliated companies they may also have controlling stakes in other companies that are already “grandchildren” in relation to the parent company. Such a peculiar genealogy allows the holding, having a relatively small own capital control vast arrays of financial resources.

This association is being undertaken in order to reduce intersectoral competition through a single, centralized management of production, supply, sales of goods, planning their actions to introduce new technology and a forward-looking strategy for common action in the future. The concern does not deprive its enterprises of production, and often commercial independence for the current time, its goal, rather, is to specialize and at the same time integrate its enterprises into a single economic complex.

Finally, the concern special kind is a conglomerate. It unites various enterprises and companies of the national economy that are not related to each other, provides them with almost complete independence and controls them only according to a relatively small list of financial indicators.

More articles on economics

Production costs and profit
The problems of production costs have been and remain the subject of research by economists of the most different directions world economic thought. The most complete theory of costs ...

Accounting and analysis of cash flows on the example of Azimut Security Company LLC
Among the main problems of the Russian economy, many economists highlight the deficit Money at enterprises to carry out their current and investment activities ...

Comprehensive analysis of the economic activity of an enterprise on the example of LLC OPT-Service KMV
Transition to market economy requires a trade enterprise to increase the efficiency of activities, the competitiveness of goods and services sold on the basis of the introduction of achiev...

Cartel - syndicate - trust - concern, conglomerate, transnational corporation (TNC). Definitions, advantages, disadvantages, contradictions of the indicated organizational structures. Concern as a modern organizational form of big capital, which includes non-market and market principles. A conglomerate as a concern that has lost its industry identity. TNK as a concern operating in many countries. The transition from one organizational form to another within the framework of this chain as a resolution of organizational contradictions. Correlation between centralism in the organization and operational and economic independence of subdivisions.

The sequence of the proposed organizational forms actually corresponds to the history (and logic) of the development of monopoly capital. Recall that it is the selection given capital as an independent, reproducing on its own basis, led to qualitative changes in economic system, introducing into it the principles of regulation, undermining the dominance of the market economic organization, the development of the contract system as an independent form of economic organization and the strengthening of the intra-company hierarchy through the concentration of production and capital.

Historically, the first form of capital-monopoly, which has developed and independently reproduces precisely on a monopolistic basis, is a cartel (cartel agreement).

A cartel is an agreement between legally and commercially independent enterprises that agree among themselves on pricing policy and division of the market (production quotas, etc.). Here firms (large enough) enter into a legal agreement with their own kind. This is a contract type agreement, since its participants do not lose their independence and are equal in rights at the time of the transaction.

It should be noted that the cartel form of a monopolistic formation turned out to be quite tenacious. There are currently many informal cartels in the export-import sector and a number of legally operating cartels. These include OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, a cartel agreement between state oil companies), Seven Sisters (an oil cartel of seven leading Western oil companies). Cartel agreements are now generally subject to antitrust laws, so quite often they are concluded on the basis of gentleman's agreements.

Another form in which monopoly capital existed was the syndicate. This is an association of legally independent enterprises that lose their commercial independence, since the sale of products goes through a single sales office - a syndicate. Here capital-monopoly is represented by an agreement that limits the independence and sovereignty of all its participants. It can be argued that this agreement falls under the characteristics of a contract, but it is not only an agreement. The loss of commercial independence is, perhaps, the first real step towards the unification of different capitals into one structure (intracompany).

It should be noted that until 1917 the largest Russian monopoly capitals were represented precisely by the form of a syndicate (Prodamet, Produgol, Prodvagon, etc.).

The next organizational form of monopoly capital was the trust. This is an association whose members lose both legal and commercial independence, turning into structural units one firm. The fundamental transformation of market relations into intra-company relations has taken place!

The largest American firms that ensured the transition to mass production are precisely the trusts (General Motors, Ford Motors, Standard Oil, General Electric, etc.).

Despite the obvious advantages of the intra-company hierarchy, trusts had at least two significant drawbacks - sluggishness, leading under certain conditions to a rejection of the achievements of scientific and technological progress, and a high probability of bureaucratization and complete replacement economic relations to administrative ones (the latter is not safe in conditions of opportunism and the desire to realize the private interests of the company's bureaucracy to the detriment of corporate interests).

overcome both indicated shortcomings it was only possible to abandon the trust form of organization. Concerns began to form in place of trusts. A concern is an association of enterprises, companies (both legally independent and non-independent), related in whole participation system, personal union, financial, credit, scientific and technical and other connections. The core that ensures the organizational unity of this association is control.

A parent company stands out in the concern, which has all the threads of dependencies. This organizational form combines both the centralized principle (control) and the operational and economic independence of the units. Finances, capital investments (investments) and R & D (scientific research and development work) are rigidly centralized in the concern.

Such an organizational structure is more susceptible to the achievements of scientific and technological progress and, in comparison with the trust, is less susceptible to the threat of “infection with the virus of bureaucracy”.

The concern includes complex non-market-market relations. The criterion for choosing one or another form of transaction in the intercompany turnover of the concern is a comparison of the costs incurred by each of the three possible forms of economic organization, from which the management of the concern makes a specific choice. Concern - modern form organizations of big capital-monopoly.

A conglomerate is a concern that has actually lost its industry face when the individual businesses in the company are in no way connected to each other (neither technologically nor organizationally). This form of organization of big capital-monopoly, in our opinion, is much less stable in comparison with the concern. That is why conglomerates are short-lived, transient, mobile.

The line separating the concern from the conglomerate, at first glance, may seem arbitrary. But, as it seems to us, it is still real. Any large monopoly capital that exists in the organizational form of a concern has an “industry entity”, that type of business that either provides the bulk of the sold products or is technologically connected with other activities.

Specifically, these problems are resolved in the allocation of such organizational forms of increasing the size of capital as vertical integration (“forward”, “backward”, natural), horizontal integration, combination, diversification (more on this see 2.5.2).

As we will see, all these organizational forms have their own logic, framework, and none of them represents a chaotic increase in the size of capital according to the principle “attach everything that lies badly, and then sort it out on the merits”. But, according to the authors, it is this principle that underlies the allocation of conglomerates.

A transnational corporation (TNC) is an international concern both in terms of capital, scope, and control. Again, the correspondence of TNCs to the generic concept of concern becomes fundamental.

For us, this is a concern in a specific form associated with the internationalization of capital and production.

Almost all the largest concerns of our time are international, that is, they are TNCs. Most often they are multinational in capital (shares are sold and bought freely on the stock market and are bought by both residents and non-residents), single-national in control (any large concern has its own nationality, its own “nationality”, and this is not just a place of registration. For example, after the merger of the West German concern "Daimler-Benz" and the American "Chrysler", the actual control over the activities of the latter passed to West German capital. This is now the "common nationality" of this company) and are multinational in their field of activity.

But there are exceptions, when control over the concern belongs to the capital of several countries. There are few such examples. The most colorful, of course, is the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Royal Dutch - Shell, one of the three largest world producers. In addition to him, this is the Anglo-Dutch chemical-food concern Unilever, the Anglo-American-Canadian non-ferrous metallurgy giant International Nickle Company of Canada, and a few others.

For us, the organizational form is fundamental, and not the number of “nationalities” of capitals that exercise control, so we also refer to the above examples as TNCs.

Let us now consider the very mechanism of transition from one organizational form of capital-monopoly to another. In our opinion, this transition is the resolution of organizational contradictions accumulating in previous forms.

The transition to a cartel is due to the impossibility of building gigantic intra-company hierarchies at this stage. There is simply no other way to monopolize the market, how to sign a framework agreement with their own kind.

The leap in organizational form to a syndicate is due to the difficulties of controlling the activities of cartels and the relative ease of moving away from agreements reached(no one in the cartel has lost either legal or commercial independence). A cartel is an organizationally unstable form. In a syndicate, all participants not only assume the same obligations, but they also lose their commercial independence.

The transition from a syndicate to a trust is due to an increase in transaction costs and the need for closer coordination in the face of a sharp increase in the capacity of markets (cars, oil and oil products, ferrous metals, etc.). The trust form removes this contradiction and makes it possible to centralize grandiose (at that time) resources to satisfy the very rapidly growing markets for standard goods. But, as mentioned above, the trust form is also not without organizational shortcomings (weak susceptibility to scientific and technical progress and the possibility of bureaucratization). It becomes internally contradictory, and this contradiction can be resolved only as a result of the emergence of a new organizational form of capital-monopoly - the concern.

The concern is currently the best organizational form, which combines both a well-known measure of centralism and the possibility of operational and economic independence of structural units.

Now it is time to consider the second side of the process of fundamental transformation of market relations into intra-company relations - from the side of specific ways of increasing intra-company hierarchies.