The Business Environment – fifth edition / بيئة الأعمال – الطبعة الخامسة

The Business Environment, Business activity is a fundamental and universal feature of human existence and yet the concept of ‘business’ is difficult to define with any degree of precision.

Dictionary definitions tend to describe it as being concerned with buying and selling or with trade and commerce, or the concern of profit-making organizations, and clearly, all of these would come within the accepted view of business.

Such a restricted view, however, would exclude large parts of the work of government and its agencies and the activities of nonprofit-making organizations – a perspective it would be hard to sustain in a climate in which business methods, skills, attitudes, and objectives are being increasingly adopted by these organizations.

It is this broader view of business and its activities which is adopted below and which forms the focus of an investigation into the business environment.

Most business activity takes place within an organizational context and even a cursory investigation of the business world reveals the wide variety of organizations involved, ranging from the small local supplier of a single good or service to the multibillion-dollar international or multinational corporation producing and trading on a global scale.

Given this rich organizational diversity, most observers of the business scene tend to differentiate between organizations in terms of their size, type of product and/or market, methods of finance, scale of operations, legal status, and so on.

Nissan, for example, would be characterized as a major multinational car producer and distributor trading on world markets, while a local builder is likely to be seen as a small business operating at a local level with a limited market and relatively restricted turnover.