Industry
For other uses of this term, see Industry (disambiguation)
An
industry is generally any grouping of
businesses that shares a common method of generating profits, such as the "movie industry", the "automobile industry", or the "cattle industry". It is also used specifically to refer to an area of
economic production focused on
manufacturing which involves large amounts of upfront
capital investment before any
profit can be realized, also called "heavy industry."
Industry in the second sense became a key sector of production in
European and
North American countries during the
Industrial Revolution, which upset previous
mercantile and
feudal economies through many successive rapid advances in technology, such as the development of
steam engines,
power looms, and advances in large scale
steel and
coal production. Industrial countries then assumed a
capitalist economic policy.
Railroads (railways) and
steam-powered ships began speedily integrating previously impossibly-distant world markets, enabling private
companies to develop to then-unheard of size and
wealth. Following the Industrial Revolution, perhaps a third of world's economic output is derived from manufacturing industries—more than
agriculture's share, but now less than that of the
service sector.
In
economics and
urban planning,
industrial is an intensive type of land use and economic activity involved with
manufacturing and production.
List of industries and prominent companies
The
North American Industry Classification System and other national variants identify sectors of economic activity for
statistical and national accounting purposes.
Information (51)
*Wilshire 5000 Index market cap size:
11% + 5% )
Computer hardware and
software production. Computer hardware and software is together the second largest category of the Wilshire 5000.
*
List of software companies
>Telecommunications
*
AT&T
*
GTE (defunct)
*
MCI
*
Cbeyond
*
Qwest
*
WorldCom (defunct)
Finance and Insurance (52)
*Wilshire 5000 Index market cap size:
22% )
Fiancial services is by far the largest category in the
Wilshire 5000 index of 6,700 publicly traded american companies ).
Health Care and Social Assistance (62)
*Wilshire 5000 Index market cap size:
13% )
Health care is the second largest category in the Wilshire 5000.
>Pharmaceuticals
*
List of pharmaceutical companies
Manufacturing (31-33)
>Chemical production
*
3M
*
Dow
>Steel production
*
USX
Food and Beverages
*
List of beverage companies
Marxism and industry
Control of industry became a key point of
Marxist theory. The
labor theory of value holds that the worth of a given object exists only because of the work that somebody has exerted to set it into its current state or form. Unimproved, natural objects such as trees and rocks generally have little value; but if wood is carved into a piano, or rocks are built into a house, then the resulting object suddenly has value because of this labor.
Marxists hold that the relationship between the
bourgeois capitalist class—those wealthy enough to invest significant capital in industry—and the
proletarian laborers who work for them is fundamentally parasitic; that the capitalists, in essence, receive free
money far beyond their original investment by paying workers far less than the full value of the objects that their labor produces. Marxists therefore advocate that the workers themselves should own the
means of production—
capital assets such as factories and equipment used for production. In
Leninist countries such as the
Soviet Union, this plan was implemented by making all capital assets owned by the state collective—theoretically, by the workers themselves.
Maoism, the economic philosophies of
Chinese Communist leader
Mao Zedong, agrees with previous Marxist thought on industry, but prescribes a different solution. Instead of workers or the collective owning the factories, Maoism advocates a resettlement of the populace into
rural areas and a return to a decentralized
agrarian way of life.
Stalin forced a rapid
industrialization of the (then mostly agrarian) Soviet Union in the years before
World War II with his
Five Year Plans.
See also
*
Adam Smith
*
capitalism
*
communism
*
economics
*
Industrial archaeology
*
Marxism
*
political economy
External links
Yahoo! - Industry Index
Industries | Reuters.com
* Indusrial Machinery