Business Structures, Environment, and Social Responsibility
External Growth Forms
- Fusion: Occurs when two companies unite, dissolving their individual legal personalities to form a new, larger company.
- Absorption: Occurs when one company purchases or acquires another, resulting in the absorbed company losing its legal personality.
- Holding: Occurs when a company gains control of other companies by buying a majority of their stocks and shares.
- Trust: A consortium comprising companies involved in different phases of the production of a product.
- Cartel: An organization of independent companies in the same phase of the production process, formed to control the market and reduce or eliminate competition.
- UTE (Temporary Union of Companies): Independent ventures partnering to develop or perform a specific work, service, or supply.
SMEs (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises)
SMEs account for 90% of Spanish companies, highlighting their great importance. They present a number of characteristics:
- Limited business training
- Low financial capacity
- Varying skills and technical training of personnel
- Technological obsolescence
- Flexible organization
- Staff integration
- Development in niche markets
- Significant employment creation
Influence of Environment on the Company: The Company as a System
- The company is an open system: It interacts with its environment, and everything that happens outside the company affects and influences its decisions.
- The company is formed by combining various elements or subsystems. This combination provides a unique characteristic that none of the individual subsystems possess.
- The company is a global system: Any influence on one of its subsystems or components impacts the others and the whole.
- The company is self-regulating: It adapts to cyclical changes.
Environment
- General environment: Factors affecting all firms (socio-cultural, legal, political, technological, economic, demographic).
- Specific environment: Factors that specifically affect each company, varying depending on the business (customers, suppliers, unions, competitors, public administration, financial institutions).
Organizational Culture
People act differently in isolation versus within a group. A working group creates links between its members, revolving around the satisfaction of economic needs. The way this group acts is called the organizational culture.
Social Responsibility
Recently, companies are expected not only to be efficient in obtaining goods and services but also to improve the socioeconomic context in which they operate.
Social Balance
Many companies, especially large ones, present the social effects of their activities on the environment in the form of a balance sheet. It is an instrument to measure social outcomes. Key concepts:
- Social cost: Direct and indirect losses incurred by society as a result of business activities.
- Social capital: The positive consequences for society resulting from business activities.