Two centuries of the great revolution have given present-day industrial
society a capital plant the like of which has never existed on the
planet in any historical period. After two hundred years of meteoric
development, it exists today on a planet-wide scale and at a level of
all-pervasive dominance undreamed of even up to the middle of the last
century.
Modern industry "plants"--steel plants, cement plants, open pit mines,
textile plants, machine tool plants, auto plants, rubber factories, oil
refineries--not only occupy extensive acreage per plant, but the same
interests and corporate managements operate dozens of plants in widely
separated geographical areas and produce a great variety of goods and
services. An experienced observer feels entirely at home in any
industrial center, on any continent. In Detroit, in Dusseldorf, in
Osaka, in Shanghai, in Bombay, the architecture of the plants is
essentially the same, the machines in the widely separated plants bear
a striking resemblance to one another, and the problems of management
are similar.
Unit plants and their coordinated managements in the aggregate compose
the present-day world economy. They are the essence of its being. They
occupy the skyline and dominate the economic life of modern industrial
society. They are the units which make up the sum-total of modern
industry which, in its turn, is the bony structure around which have
grown the sinews and muscle of present-day planetary economy.
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