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the BUSINESS
E NVIRONMENT
themes and issues in a globalizing world
Social Technological
Environmental Ethical
the BUSINESS
E NVIRONMENT
themes and issues in a globalizing world
fourth edition
1
1
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To Barbara, Laura, and Becky (PW)
Detailed contents����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ix
List of cases������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ xvi
About the authors������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� xix
Acknowledgements����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� xxii
About the book���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� xxiii
New to this edition������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������xxv
How to use this book������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� xxvi
How to use the online resources������������������������������������������������������������������ xxviii
Glossary���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 476
Index��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 491
DETAILED CONTENTS
The approach of this book—themes and issues����������������������� 3 Scarcity—the heart of the economic environment?�������������36
Is the world becoming ‘flat’?�������������������������������������������������������������82 Case Study: Taxing questions for business����������������������������� 117
Introduction: what is the social and Looking ahead—beyond the triple bottom line������������������ 204
cultural environment?���������������������������������������������������������������������� 155 Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 206
Case Study: Caterpillar��������������������������������������������������������������������� 206
xii Detailed contents
The 2008 global crisis and the end of the Washington Further reading������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 324
Consensus����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 287 Useful websites������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 324
Global ethics for the global business?�������������������������������������� 292 References����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 324
Employment practices������������������������������������������������������������������������ 293
Human rights��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 293 12 Is inequality bad for business?�������������� 327
Environment����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 293 Dorron Otter and Paul Wetherly
Abuse of market power���������������������������������������������������������������������� 294 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 328
Attitudes to graft and corruption���������������������������������������������������� 294 What is equality?��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 328
International migration��������������������������������������������������������������������� 294
Equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome������� 328
Global responses to these ethical challenges������������������������������� 294
Equality of opportunity���������������������������������������������������������������������� 329
Looking ahead�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 295
Why has equality of opportunity moved up
Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 295 the agenda?�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 330
Case Study: Is trade the engine of growth?��������������������������� 296 Do women have equal opportunities in business?����������� 332
Review and discussion questions����������������������������������������������� 297 A woman’s place?�������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 333
Assignments������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 297 Flexible work����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 334
Further reading������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 298 Flexibility and parenthood��������������������������������������������������������� 334
Occupational segregation����������������������������������������������������������������� 335
Useful websites������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 298
The gender pay gap��������������������������������������������������������������������������� 337
References����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 298
Social mobility—is Britain a mobile society?������������������������� 341
11 Does business have too much power?�� 300 What has inequality got to do with business?���������������������� 341
Paul Wetherly Incentives����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 341
Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 301 The going rate�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 342
Trickle down������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 342
What is power? What’s it got to do with business?������������ 301
Social cohesion������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 342
Corporate power��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 303
Morale���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 343
Political power and corporate power��������������������������������������� 304 Greed and social responsibility�������������������������������������������������������� 343
Stakeholders and the ‘play of power’��������������������������������������� 306 Reputation��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 343
Bargaining power�������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 307 Income inequality������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 343
Consumer sovereignty?��������������������������������������������������������������� 307 Complexity�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 343
Industrial relations������������������������������������������������������������������������ 309
Wealth inequality�������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 348
Buyer power in the supply chain��������������������������������������������� 312
Why has inequality increased?���������������������������������������������������� 350
Engagement with CSOs��������������������������������������������������������������������� 312
Changes in labour markets—‘flexibility’ for
Business in the political arena������������������������������������������������������ 313
the 99 per cent, protected markets for the 1 per cent�������������� 350
Does business enjoy a ‘privileged’ position in
The global financial crisis����������������������������������������������������������������� 351
the political process?�������������������������������������������������������������������������� 314
Globalization���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 351
Control without trying?���������������������������������������������������������������������� 316
Technology�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 351
The consequences of globalization������������������������������������������� 317 Financialization����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 351
xiv Detailed contents
Capital in the twenty-first century������������������������������������������������� 351 Getting the measure of the public sector—size
What can be done?���������������������������������������������������������������������������� 352 and functions����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 389
Looking ahead�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 353 Public sector employment���������������������������������������������������������������� 389
Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 353 Composition of the public sector workforce����������������������� 390
Public spending������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 391
Case Study: Breaking open the closed-shop society?������ 354
Composition of public spending��������������������������������������������� 391
Review and discussion questions����������������������������������������������� 355
The UK in an international context������������������������������������������������ 395
Assignments������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 355
Contesting the role of the public sector—for
Further reading������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 355 and against the state�������������������������������������������������������������������������� 398
Useful websites������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 356 The market versus the state: the ideological contest����������������� 399
References����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 356 Nationalization, denationalization, renationalization?
Arguments over the mixed economy��������������������������������������������� 401
13 Creating effective trading blocs: Reasons for nationalization������������������������������������������������������� 401
what lessons does the European The turn to privatization������������������������������������������������������������� 403
Union provide?�������������������������������������� 358 Social justice and the welfare state�������������������������������������������� 405
Stratis Koutsoukos and Dorron Otter Neoliberalism and the critique of the welfare state������������������ 411
Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 359 Is the welfare state bad for business?��������������������������������������������� 413
Financing the new venture������������������������������������������������������������ 444 Challenges for the future global political
Business models����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 444 and economic environment���������������������������������������������������������� 461
Growing the new venture������������������������������������������������������������������ 444 Global and national economic governance�������������������������������� 461
Looking ahead�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 445 Global power of big business����������������������������������������������������������� 464
How will the global marketplace change the way Global climate change����������������������������������������������������������������������� 465
entrepreneurs create and grow their businesses?������������������������ 445 Global inequality and political instability������������������������������������ 466
How will policymakers respond to the changing Looking ahead: the social environment���������������������������������� 467
needs of entrepreneurs, and SMEs?������������������������������������������������ 448 Social inequality and relative affluence���������������������������������������� 467
Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 448 Migration����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 468
Demographic changes����������������������������������������������������������������������� 468
Case study: Diving deep into entrepreneurship: how an
entrepreneur is building a business in aquaponics���������� 449 Looking ahead: the technological environment���������������� 469
Review and discussion questions����������������������������������������������� 450 Summary������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 471
Assignments������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 451 Case Study: The football business—the state of
Further reading������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 451 play in 2017�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 472
Paul Wetherly is currently reader in politics in the School of Social Sciences at Leeds Beckett
University, and has worked in higher education as a teacher, researcher, and manager for more
than twenty-five years. He studied economics and public policy as an undergraduate before
obtaining an MA in political sociology and a PhD in political theory. Paul’s teaching and re-
search have spanned discipline boundaries including economics, business, and politics. He
spent many years in the business faculty of the university where he was responsible for leading
a large business environment module. Paul’s other publications include a range of articles and
books on British politics, the state, and political theory.
Dorron Otter studied politics, philosophy, and economics at Oxford University and he worked
in fields as diverse as youth and community work, retailing, tourism, and insurance. In 1984,
he undertook a PGCE and spent five years teaching economics and business at Queen Mary’s
Sixth Form College in Basingstoke. He completed his postgraduate studies in the political
economy of development at the University of Leeds and then was the first British Petroleum
Fellow in Economic Awareness at the University of Durham. He worked at Leeds Beckett
University from 1991 to 2017 where he combined a range of teaching and senior academic
management roles and although recently retired he remains active in terms of academic con-
sultancy and writing. As well as his contributions to the editing and writing of this book, his
most recent publications have been a chapter on the ecological environment of business in L.
Hamilton and P. Webster (eds.), The International Business Environment (2018) and on envir
onmental thinking in P. Wetherly (ed.), Political Ideologies (2017) both published by Oxford
University Press.
■ Contributors
David Amos is a law lecturer and solicitor. He qualified as a solicitor in 1993. He continued
in practice until 1999 when he became a senior lecturer at Leeds Metropolitan University.
He moved to Manchester Metropolitan University in March 2005 before becoming head of
department at the University of Westminster. He is now Associate Dean (External Engage-
ment) at City, University of London. He was a member of the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s
Working Party on the Written Standards for the Legal Practice Course (LPC) and is an LPC
panel assessor for the Solicitors Regulation Authority.
Mike Franco is Associate Dean for Quality and Programme Leader for Accounting and Finance
at Liverpool John Moores University. His principal research interests are in the field of quality
assurance and enhancement within higher education. As programme leader for accounting
and finance his teaching interests include leadership, economics, and strategic management.
Geoff Gregson is the JR Shaw Research Chair in New Venture and Entrepreneurship and the
Associate Dean (Research) at the JR Shaw School of Business, Northern Alberta Institute of
xx About the authors
Technology (NAIT) in Canada. He holds degrees from the University of Edinburgh (PhD,
LLM, and MSc), University of Calgary (MBA), and University of Alberta (BPE). As an entre
preneur, Geoff has started up three ventures and continues to support entrepreneurs in build-
ing successful businesses; in his role at NAIT, as chairman of Axienta Ltd, a Malaysian-based
enterprise mobility company and as a board member of JB Equity, a Hong Kong-based pri-
vate equity firm focused on agri-businesses. Geoff ’s research interests include new venture
creation, SME growth, risk capital, and angel investment, technology commercialization and
intellectual property exploitation, innovation systems, innovation policy and enterprise sup-
port programmes and their evaluation. He has managed research projects from funders which
include the Economic and Social Research Council, British Academy, Technology Strategy
Board, Scottish Executive, Marie Curie (European Commission), Santander Bank, and gov-
ernment of Alberta.
Eamonn Judge is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Business and Law, Leeds Beckett Uni-
versity, and was, until recent retirement, professor at the Polish Open University, Warsaw, and
Professor at Vistula University, Warsaw (where his students kindly acted as guinea pigs for try-
ing out the new main case study of Chapter 8). His principal teaching and research interests,
where he has published extensively, are in the field of transport, environment, and business
development, particularly in relation to the UK and Poland.
Stratis Koutsoukos is a principal lecturer at Leeds Business School. Formerly deputy director
of the European Regional Business and Economic Development Unit, Stratis is a course direc-
tor for the BA in International Business and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
His main areas of research and consultancy are European regional policy, economic regenera-
tion, and European enlargement. Stratis has undertaken assignments for the European Com-
mission, European Parliament, and the Czech ministries for industry and trade and regional
development. He teaches European business strategy and international business across various
levels of study.
Chris Mulhearn is reader in economics at Liverpool John Moores University. His work has
appeared in a range of journals including: World Economy, Journal of Economic Perspectives,
World Economics, Industrial Relations Journal, and Local Economy. His most recent books in-
clude: (with Howard Vane) The Nobel Memorial Laureates in Economics: An Introduction to
Their Careers and Main Published Works (Edward Elgar, 2005); The Euro: Its Origins, Develop-
ment and Prospects (Edward Elgar, 2008); The Pioneering Papers of the Nobel Memorial Laure-
ates in Economics, vols. 1–5 (Edward Elgar, 2009), vols. 6–10 (Edward Elgar, 2010), vols. 11–14
(Edward Elgar, 2011). The third edition of his bestselling textbook, Economics for Business,
widely used in the UK and abroad, was published in 2016.
Simon Raby is Professor in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Bissett School of Business,
Mount Royal University in Canada, and a Director of Business Improvement and Growth As-
sociates Ltd, a business founded in the UK that supports business schools in their quest to re-
search and work with entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in their
regions. Simon has helped to create a multidisciplinary applied research programme ‘Promot-
ing Sustainable Performance’ to challenge the way SMEs achieve growth and has developed
leadership tools and programmes so that SMEs can apply this new thinking. Simon serves on
the Board of the Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship, is educated to doctoral
level and is an accredited and practising coach and facilitator. Simon is on the editorial board
About the authors xxi
of the International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior and Research; a guest editor for the
online journal of the Association for Management Education and Development (AMED) Or-
ganisations and People; and continues to write for academic, business, and policy audiences on
topics central to SMEs’ growth and success.
Simon Robinson FRSA, SFHEA is Professor of Applied and Professional Ethics, Leeds Busi-
ness School. He has written and researched extensively in business ethics, corporate social
responsibility, leadership, the nature and dynamics of responsibility, equality, integrity, shame
and guilt, spirituality and ethics, and ethics and care. Books include: Agape, Moral Mean-
ing and Pastoral Counselling; Case Histories in Business Ethics; Spirituality and the Practice of
Healthcare; Values in Higher Education; Ethics and Employability; The Teaching and Practice of
Professional Ethics; Spirituality, Ethics and Care; Engineering, Professional and Business Ethics;
Ethics and the Alcohol Industry; Leadership Responsibility; Business Ethics in Practice; Islam and
The West; Business Ethics: Contemporary Global and Regional Issues Co-charismatic Leadership;
Integrity and the Practice of Business; A Spirituality of Responsibility: An Islamic Perspective.
Chapters and articles include on applied ethics, integrity and dialogue, peacebuilding, respon-
sibility, responsibility–pedagogy. He is director of the Centre for Governance, Leadership and
Global Responsibility, senior editor of the new Palgrave book series on governance, leadership
and responsibility, and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Global Responsibility.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We are again indebted to all at OUP for their terrific support, especially our editors Becci Cur-
tis and Kate Gilks for keeping us on track with our writing schedule. We would like to thank all
of the authors, both those who have been part of the team on the previous editions and those
who have joined us for this fourth edition—Mike Franco, Geoff Gregson, and Simon Raby. We
would also like to extend thanks to John Meehan, Martyn Robertson, Carol Langston, Alison
Price, and Richard Rooke for their contributions to previous editions. We would also like to
extend our thanks to all the reviewers who have commented upon revised draft chapters and
reflected on their experiences of using the book with their students.
As always, we would like to thank colleagues and students at Leeds Beckett who have helped
us in developing our approach to exploring the Business Environment.
The authors and publisher are grateful to all organizations who kindly granted permission to
reproduce copyright materials within this edition. Crown copyright is reproduced under Class
Licence Number C2006010631.
Every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright holders, but this has not been
possible in every case. If notified, the publisher will undertake to rectify any errors or omis-
sions at the earliest opportunity.
ABOUT THE BOOK
This book is designed primarily for students taking their first undergraduate module in the
business environment or similar introductory modules on a range of related business degree,
foundation degree, or vocational programmes. The book will also be a useful resource for
more advanced studies. The editors both have considerable experience of teaching business
environment, and the approach of this book is based on this experience and the comments of
successive generations of students and reviewers. In addition to the editors’ own chapters in
the book, a team of contributing authors has been brought together to write specialist chapters
based on their own areas of expertise.
All of the chapters are written in an accessible and engaging style and follow a standard
layout with common pedagogical features. A key feature of the approach taken throughout the
book is to introduce readers to debates and controversies surrounding the role of business in
modern society, and to help them to think critically. In this way it is the intention of the book
to provoke lively discussion and debate.
There are two parts to the book: Part One introduces the core political, legal, economic, social-
cultural, technological, and other environments of business, and their interrelationships, fol-
lowing the STEEPLE framework. Part Two, however, goes beyond these topics and invites
readers to analyse a range of contemporary issues in the business environment such as the
financial crisis and austerity, globalization, corporate power, equal opportunity, and entrepre-
neurship. These issues have been selected due to their prominence in discussions within busi-
ness and the wider society, and their importance in shaping the future of business.
The book utilizes an innovative thematic approach to provide a consistent framework for
analysis of business and the business environment. The eight themes are intended to help the
reader to organize their own thinking about business. Each chapter begins with an overview
of how the relevant themes relate to the particular chapter and the themes are then signposted
by the use of markers in the margin, as shown here:
DIVERSITY OF BUSINESS Business is a diverse category.
INTERNAL/EXTERNAL The environment is both inside and outside organizations.
COMPLEXITY OF THE ENVIRONMENT The external environment is multi-dimensional or
complex.
LOCAL TO GLOBAL SPATIAL LEVELS Spatial levels vary from the local to the global.
DYNAMIC ENVIRONMENT The environment of business does not stand still.
INTERACTION BETWEEN BUSINESS AND THE ENVIRONMENT There is interaction between
business organizations and their environments.
xxiv About the book
Real-world cases
The book is packed with examples, mini-cases, and end of chapter case studies looking at UK,
European, and international business, illustrating each topic in real-life contexts. Careful at-
tention has been paid to select cases and examples to which the intended student audience will
be able to relate. Examples include Facebook, Cadbury, Samsung, Starbucks, Google, and the
football industry.
NEW TO THIS EDITION
This edition has been updated throughout, with a large proportion of new case and illustrative
material added. Major changes in the environment of business such as the UK referendum
vote to leave the European Union (‘Brexit’) and the subsequent vote in Parliament to trigger
Article 50 and start the process of withdrawal, and the changing attitudes to globalization that
this vote seemed in part to reflect, have been taken into account in the text. The basic structure
of the book has been retained but in the second part the chapters on the role of the public sec-
tor and on SMEs are completely new and a new chapter on inequality has been added to reflect
the increasing debate about this issue.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
Clear, concise learning objectives serve as helpful sign- When you have completed this chapter, you will be able to:
● Recognize different uses of the term business, and distinguish between different forms, such as
posts to what you can expect to learn from each chapter. private, public, and not-for-profit organizations.
● Examine the controversy concerning the nature and purpose of private sector business.
● Describe the complexity of the external environment in which business operates and explain
the idea of environmental uniqueness.
● Explore how businesses must respond to changing environmental factors in order to operate suc-
cessfully, and how they seek to influence the environment.
● Use analysis tools such as PEST or SWOT to examine the business environment.
● Identify the themes and issues used in our approach to the business environment in this book,
and how you can use them in your studies.
Themes
THEMES
Key themes, introduced in Chapter 1, are described at The following themes of the book are especially relevant to this chapter
is relevant to the topic being covered. Markers in the COMPLEXITY The nature of the economic environment is a complex mix of economic, social,
and political factors.
text indicate where one or more of the themes are il- DYNAMIC Change and uncertainty are at the heart of the economic environment and this
has been seen in the dynamic changes that have occurred in both the domestic and global
lustrated, helping to contextualize businesses and the economic environments over time.
VALUES Economics is centrally concerned with values; in the sense of the prices and costs of
environments in which they operate. goods and services, in the sense of ‘value for money’, and in the sense of who benefits from the
use of the resources.
Mini-Cases Mini-Case 1.1 Guiding the ‘hidden hand’—the minimum wage and the ‘living
The book is packed with varied, real-life examples to VALUES STAKEHOLDERS The idea of the ‘hid- ‘employees with decent minimum standards
the workplace’ and to help business ‘by ensu
show how organizations have been influenced by, re-
den hand’ is a metaphor for the way the market system,
though based on millions of independent decisions and not will be able to compete on the basis of qual
subject to an overall plan or control by any actual hand, does and services they provide and not on low pr
acted to, or shaped the business environment in which not degenerate into chaos but operates in a highly coordin- dominantly on low rates of pay’ (National A
webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/2006
ated way. It is as if a hidden hand is guiding it.
they operate. Adam Smith argued in the eighteenth century that even
though businesses may be concerned only with their self-in-
http://www.dti.gov.uk/er/nmw/index.htm).
There are different levels of NMW, depend
terest (profit) they would be guided, by and large, to serve the these rates are reviewed annually by the Low
public good. This seems like a paradox—promoting the com- sion which makes recommendations to gove
mon good by acting selfishly. Smith’s argument was that it account of economic circumstances. This me
would only be by serving the needs of others (customers) that lar, trying to balance improvements to NMW
b i ld b bl t k fit Wh b i negative effects in the form of job losses
Use your knowledge of business and current events in the world of business to think of
Pause your reading and reflect on a question, impli- that highlight each of the themes.
Business is a diverse category. It does not refer only to private sector, profit-making companies.
Public and voluntary (or third) sector organizations may also be regarded as businesses. The
Key terms
boundaries between these sectors are blurred, contested, and shift over time, for example, as
a result of the policy of privatization initiated by Conservative governments in the UK in the
1980s. Within the dominant private sector, businesses vary in a number of ways, such as legal Key terms are highlighted in chapters and collated in
structure, industry, size and market power, and geographical reach. This diversity also means
that, although there are common elements in the business environment, each business operates the end-of-book glossary, which defines subject-specific
terms and concepts to aid your understanding.
in an environment that is, to some extent, unique.
INTERNAL/EXTERNAL
This book mainly deals with the external environment, the surrounding conditions, and processes
in the world outside the organization. However, it is useful to think of the environment as also hav-
ing an internal dimension. This is because a business organization is not really a single, unified en-
tity but is internally differentiated. In other words, it is a complex system. Managers within business,
to be effective, have to deal with this internal environment as well as the external one. In add-
ition, the ability of an organization to operate successfully within its external environment depends,
ff f d d
Assignments
Assignments
1. Investigate annual reports for two FTSE companies and ana- 3. Imagine you report to a
Designed to test the knowledge you have gained from
lyse the extent to which they incorporate non-profit objec- zon who has been called studying each chapter and further your understanding,
tives and measures of performance. Committee of the House
Further reading
Further reading and online resources
Take your learning further by exploring the key aca-
Lawrence (2016) looks ahead to the ‘wave of economic, social Hutton (2015) provides a c
and technological change’ that will reshape Britain in the model of capitalism in t demic literature associated with a topic, using the anno-
2020s. reform.
tated further reading and online resource lists at the end
World Economic Forum (2017) provides an analysis of the Raworth (2017) offers a crit
global environment and global risks. the economic model it ha of every chapter to guide you. These will also point you
native approach focused
Chang (2013) provides a highly readable and challenging
environmental limits. towards useful sources to help you prepare for exams,
account of the nature of modern capitalism, confronting a
number of ‘myths’. essays, and research projects.
HOW TO USE THE
ONLINE RESOURCES
The online resources that accompany this book provide students and lecturers with ready-to-use teaching and
learning resources. Students can benefit from multiple-choice questions to test their understanding and audio
podcasts to learn on the go, while lecturers can make use of a test bank, PowerPoint slides, answers to the book’s
review questions, and a full lecturer guide for each chapter. Visit www.oup.com/uk/wetherly_otter4e/ to find
out more.
INTRODUCTION
1 ‘Business’ and its ‘environment’ in a ‘globalizing world’
Paul Wetherly and Dorron Otter
Chapter 1
Introduction: ‘Business’ and its ‘environment’ in
a ‘globalizing world’
Learning objectives
When you have completed this chapter, you will be able to:
● Recognize different uses of the term business, and distinguish between different forms, such as
private, public, and not-for-profit organizations.
● Examine the controversy concerning the nature and purpose of private sector business.
● Describe the complexity of the external environment in which business operates and explain
the idea of environmental uniqueness.
● Explore how businesses must respond to changing environmental factors in order to operate suc-
cessfully, and how they seek to influence the environment.
● Use analysis tools such as PEST or SWOT to examine the business environment.
● Identify the themes and issues used in our approach to the business environment in this book,
and how you can use them in your studies.
The themes are ways of conceptualizing business and the environment in which it operates.
You will master these themes increasingly as you work through the book, but it is useful to
begin with a brief introduction to each one.
DIVERSITY
Business is a diverse category. It does not refer only to private sector, profit-making companies.
Public and voluntary (or third) sector organizations may also be regarded as businesses. The
boundaries between these sectors are blurred, contested, and shift over time, for example, as
a result of the policy of privatization initiated by Conservative governments in the UK in the
1980s. Within the dominant private sector, businesses vary in a number of ways, such as legal
structure, industry, size and market power, and geographical reach. This diversity also means
that, although there are common elements in the business environment, each business operates
in an environment that is, to some extent, unique.
INTERNAL/EXTERNAL
This book mainly deals with the external environment, the surrounding conditions, and processes
in the world outside the organization. However, it is useful to think of the environment as also hav-
ing an internal dimension. This is because a business organization is not really a single, unified en-
tity but is internally differentiated. In other words, it is a complex system. Managers within business,
to be effective, have to deal with this internal environment as well as the external one. In add
ition, the ability of an organization to operate successfully within its external environment depends,
in large part, on the effectiveness of internal systems and procedures. The internal environment
has to be managed and adapted to the demands and opportunities of the external environment.
COMPLEXITY
We might think of the external environment primarily in terms of economic conditions and
trends, to do with the behaviour of competitors and customers. The economy is, of course, of
major importance. However, a moment’s thought makes it clear that the external environment
in which business operates is more complex and needs to be analysed also in terms of its politi-
cal–legal, social–cultural, technological, and other aspects. These aspects are interrelated, as we
can see if we think of the role that political decisions made in government have in shaping the
economic environment. We will also see that many issues facing business have economic, social,
political, and technological aspects. This way of conceptualizing a complex environment of busi-
ness is captured by the analytical framework of PEST (Political–Economic–Social–Technological).
In the first part of this book the chapters reflect an elaboration of the PEST model in which seven
interrelated environments are identified: Economic, Technological, Political, Legal, Social–cul-
tural, Ethical, and Natural.
LOCAL TO GLOBAL
Spatial level or scale refers to the geographical or territorial unit of analysis that we use to
conceptualize and analyse the business environment. As citizens we live within the territory of
a nation state, such as the UK, and we tend to think of our identities at least partly in terms of
nationality. Similarly, the business environment tends to be discussed primarily at national level.
For example, in the media we come across references to British business, the British economy,
British society, and the British government. However, sometimes it is more appropriate to think
of business and its environment at a more local level, perhaps in terms of an urban area or
region. On the other hand, it has become increasingly important to think of business and the
environment on a much larger spatial level, such as European or global. There is much debate
about the nature, extent, and implications of globalization. In a ‘globalizing world’ there is a ten-
dency for business and other economic, social, and political processes and relationships to move
across or beyond the borders of nation states. One of the most important manifestations of this
is the growth of multinational businesses.
‘Business’ and its ‘environment’ in a ‘globalizing world’ 5
DYNAMIC
We live in a fast-changing world, especially in the advanced or rich societies such as Western Eur
ope. We have come to expect that the society in which we live and the way we live our lives will
change over time, even within fairly short periods. This is a characteristic feature of modernity.
This can be seen most clearly in relation to technological innovation and its impact in all areas of
our lives. Today we are facing a near-term transformation of work brought about by automation
and the ‘robot revolution’. Because of this, businesses have to respond and adapt to changes in
their environment, and deal with uncertainty about the future. But, at the same time, business
organizations are themselves powerful agents of change, as shown by the example of techno-
logical innovation which is driven largely by business (see Chapter 3). Indeed, the dynamism of
western societies is deeply rooted in basic features of their market economies—competition and
the profit motive. This is often discussed in terms of entrepreneurial behaviour, which involves
risk-taking and innovation, rather than relying on tried-and-tested approaches (see Chapter 15).
Competitive markets place emphasis on innovation as the means of keeping up or getting ahead.
INTERACTION
There is two-way interaction between business organizations and their environment. Businesses
influence and are influenced by their environments. Business organizations are not passive but
seek to shape environmental factors to their own advantage. For example, business is an im-
portant actor in the political arena where it uses its connections, resources, and influence to
shape policy decisions in its favour (see Chapter 11). Advertising is another obvious example of
environment-shaping behaviour. Firms do not simply respond to changes in lifestyles and con-
sumer behaviour that are happening automatically ‘out there’ in society but seek to influence and
even create such changes through persuasive advertising. It is often difficult to disentangle this
two-way interaction: firms may influence consumer behaviour but they also have to stay in tune
with changing lifestyles and preferences.
STAKEHOLDERS
Business decisions have to be made in a context of multiple stakeholder interests and demands.
A stakeholder is any individual or group that is affected by, and thus has a stake in, business
decisions, and can be defined very widely to include society as a whole. This is because busi-
ness decisions can have consequential effects for all members of society. For example, with the
unfolding of the financial crisis since 2008 we have come to realize that we are all stakeholders in
the banks. Stakeholders have the capacity to affect business performance through their decisions
and behaviour. Satisfied customers will demonstrate loyalty in the form of repeat purchases, but
dissatisfied ones will take the option to ‘exit’. The same can be said of shareholders and employ-
ees. Furthermore, stakeholders may organize to apply pressure in order to influence business
decisions. Consumers may support boycotts of businesses judged to be unethical; shareholders
may campaign to influence the remuneration of board members; and employees may negoti-
ate with employers through trade unions. It can be argued, in a stakeholder model of business,
that the best businesses actively seek to engage with stakeholders. In any event, businesses now
operate in an environment of greater public scepticism and, more than before, have to work to
retain public trust.
VALUES
There are competing perspectives and values concerning the nature and purpose of business in
society—relating to its power, responsibilities, performance, and ethics. For most of the twentieth
century the western business model or capitalist system—based on private enterprise, competi-
tion, and profit—was challenged by socialism as an alternative model of economic organization
based on state control and planning. It was argued that the capitalist values of individualism and
self-interest had a downside in the persistence within these societies of poverty and inequality.
6 Introduction
This was an argument about values: in favour of capitalism its supporters argued that it pro-
moted individual freedom and choice, while its critics valued solidarity and equality more highly.
Although the appeal of socialism may have faded, arguments about the acceptable extent of
inequality have not gone away, as we can see from controversy surrounding the pay of chief
executives and bankers’ bonuses in recent years. And business finds itself at the centre of many
other value-based debates in contemporary society concerned with issues such as environmen-
tal protection and climate change, fair trade, the responsibility of western companies for working
conditions in developing countries, discrimination, and the social usefulness of some business
activities and products (e.g. unhealthy foods). These debates are part of everyday political discus-
sion and dialogue in which business must engage.
Use your knowledge of business and current events in the world of business to think of examples
that highlight each of the themes.
■ What is business?
INTERACTION This is a book about the ‘business environment’ in a ‘globalizing world’. The
purpose of this introduction is to help you get to grips with what the business environment is,
why it is important to study and understand it, and the particular approach taken in this book.
All businesses operate in a changing and, in some ways, unique environment that is the source
of both threats and opportunities, and business decisions are concerned with striving to operate
successfully in this environment given the strengths and weaknesses of the organization. This
way of thinking about business decisions is the basis of the well-known SWOT analysis (see the
SWOT section towards the end of this chapter). For example, businesses may have to respond
to changing market conditions affecting the demand for their products, the behaviour of com-
petitors, or changes in government policy. For example, all businesses must think carefully
about the opportunities and threats presented by the UK’s decision to leave the EU (Brexit).
Whether a business manages to operate successfully within its environment depends on the
criteria used to judge ‘success’. We will see that this is a contested idea because success as judged
by a business in its own terms (e.g. profitability) might be quite different from success as judged
by others or from the point of view of society as a whole. For example, a reduction in corpora-
tion tax might be welcomed by business but opposed by others on the grounds that it would
mean business not being required to contribute to society as it should. There are fundamental
questions here about the nature and role of business and what we expect in terms of the perfor-
mance of the economy. The answers involve rival models of business and the economic system.
We will look more closely at the meaning of ‘business’ and its ‘environment’, but we will
begin with the idea that we live in a ‘globalizing world’.
■ A globalizing world?
LOCAL TO GLOBAL From around the last quarter of the twentieth century, globalization
has come to be widely seen and experienced as a key feature of life in the modern world, and
even as an inexorable process of becoming more and more globalized. This is particularly the
‘Business’ and its ‘environment’ in a ‘globalizing world’ 7
case in the rich countries of the West, but the very nature of a globalizing world means that the
number of countries and people who are affected continually increases.
One of the ways we can gain an insight into the set of processes that are constitutive of a
globalizing world is by considering the growth in international tourism. Foreign travel is made
possible by rising living standards which mean that people have more money for leisure activi-
ties after they have paid for food, housing, and other necessities. More specifically, interna-
tional tourism has been facilitated by technological developments lowering the cost of travel.
Along with communications technologies, it can be argued that transportation is one of the
principal facilitators of globalization. In the nineteenth century, British people took advantage
of the new technology of steam trains to go on excursions to the seaside. In the late twentieth
century, they took advantage of the new technology of passenger airlines to holiday overseas.
Mass foreign travel is a fairly recent phenomenon in rich countries like the UK—we might
think of the growth of package holidays to European destinations, such as Spain, in the 1960s
and 1970s as a watershed. Since then foreign travel has become a more normal experience of
British people and they are travelling further afield: destinations that were once ‘exotic’ be-
come normal. Citizens of the rich countries are now being joined in rapidly growing numbers
by people from fast-developing BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India, and China).
Hence the world is ‘globalizing’ in the sense that European, and now Russian and Chinese,
people have increasingly global horizons when it comes to tourism. Tourism, in other words, is
increasingly international or cross-border and creates interconnections and interdependence
between the world’s economies. The most obvious way it does this is through the dependence
of the many and diverse companies and their employees that are part of the tourism sector on
revenues generated by foreign visitors. Thus, UK economic performance is dependent in part
on the country’s success in attracting foreign tourists. The payments they make are equivalent,
in terms of the balance of payments, to revenues earned by the export of goods. This intercon-
nectedness is the essence of what we mean by a ‘globalizing world’.
VALUES International tourism is not new, but the volume of cross-border movement is
increasing. It is also still confined largely to travel between the rich countries of the world,
yet people from the rich countries are travelling to more destinations and foreign visits from
developing BRIC countries are growing fast. Hence, globalization is extending in geographical
reach as well. (Still, we are a very long way from foreign travel being part of the lifestyle of
all people in the world, and it is questionable whether such an outcome would be feasible or
desirable. Again, what counts as success from a business point of view—more customers, rev-
enue and profit—and from the point of view of individual customers—more affordable foreign
travel—might be undesirable from the viewpoint of societal or environmental impact, such as
damaging areas of natural beauty or contributing to global warming.)
If people are increasingly taking part in a globalizing world, then the same can be said of
business. Indeed, it can be argued that globalization is fundamentally an economic phenom-
enon, driven by the profit motive and competitive pressures in the market. We can see this
from the tourism example: although companies cannot make people undertake foreign visits
against their will, the rise of international tourism has been powered by companies continually
seeking new products and markets and promoting them through marketing.
A globalizing world involves the increasing volume and reach of cross-border movement
and consequent interconnectedness. These movements include people, trade, and interna-
tional investment. Globalization is both driven by business and constitutes the environment in
which it operates. Thus, it is essential to our understanding of ‘business’ in its ‘environments’.
However, globalization is not, in fact, an inexorable process. Although economic globaliza-
tion can be seen as part and parcel of the inherent dynamism of markets as firms search for
8 Introduction
new markets and new locations for profitable production, it is also facilitated by political deci-
sions and agreements on international trade, foreign investment, and migration. Western gov-
ernments have tended to frame globalization both as an economic reality to which countries
must adapt and as a desirable policy to pursue. There has been a consensus on globalization.
However, in so far as globalization is a policy choice, it is dependent upon continued popular
support and democratic legitimacy. It is important to recognize that globalization has always
been contested and the focus of vocal protest in the shape of the ‘anti-globalization move-
ment’ which has raised questions about who benefits and has claimed, in particular, that the
policy is largely driven by the interests of western multinational corporations (MNCs). Anti-
globalization has generally been a movement of the left with its demands for global justice and
environmental protection. However, in recent years the growth in forms of right-wing, anti-
establishment, politics has been interpreted as, in part, a backlash against globalization, driven
by the feeling that many people are ‘left behind’. The UK referendum vote in 2016 to leave the
European Union (Brexit) and the election of Donald Trump as US President have both been
seen as expressions of this backlash. For example, the director general of the International
Labour Organization (ILO) characterized these two political shocks as ‘the revolt of the dis-
possessed’ in response to the benefits of globalization having been distributed ‘extraordinarily
unfairly’ and people feeling that they are getting a ‘raw deal’ (Allen 2016). Similarly, the head of
the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, argued that the benefits of globali-
zation have to be more evenly spread and action taken to reduce inequality (Elliott 2017),
and UK Prime Minister Theresa May has pointed to ‘downsides to globalization’ especially
for ‘people . . . on modest to low incomes’ who ‘see the emergence of a new global elite who
sometimes seem to play by a different set of rules and whose lives are far removed from their
everyday existence’ (Merrick 2016). Lagarde and May are not, of course, siding with the anti-
globalizers and they emphasize the benefits of globalization. Their argument is really that
those benefits need to be more widely shared in order to maintain the legitimacy of globaliza-
tion. However, some commentators have talked of an era of ‘deglobalization’ (Sharma 2016).
DIVERSITY One way in which it is common to think about business is in terms of a specific
business organization with which we are familiar, such as Amazon.com. It is this meaning that
is being used when we refer to ‘starting a business’ or ‘managing the business’. But there are a
number of other, related, ways in which we might answer the question ‘what is business?’ To
pursue the Amazon example a little further, we can see that two other answers are implied.
One is to think of business in terms of a specific activity, which is what we refer to in answer to
the question what ‘line of business’ an individual or organization is in. In this sense, Amazon
can be described as an ‘e-commerce and cloud computing company’ which started out as an
Internet bookseller and has since diversified. (It is worth noting here that large global corpor
ations are often conglomerates, engaged in several business activities.) Amazon is also an
example of a specific legal form of business—it is a ‘public company’ owned by its shareholders
and part of the ‘private sector’ of the economy. As a private sector business, Amazon strives
‘Business’ and its ‘environment’ in a ‘globalizing world’ 9
to operate profitably through sales of its products in competition with other companies in the
same market. For example, Amazon competes not only with other Internet retailers but also
businesses engaged in retail sales of books, music, consumer electronics, etc. in specialized
stores and supermarkets. The particular market in which a business operates is clearly a key
aspect of its environment, the arena in which businesses compete.
LOCAL TO GLOBAL But it is also important to think more broadly in terms of the charac-
ter of the business system as a whole. We might refer to this, using terms such as ‘the market
system’ or ‘capitalism’, but we should think of it not just in terms of economic organizations
such as businesses but the whole range of organizations that interact to shape the pattern of
economic activity, including trade unions, professional bodies, consumer groups, regulatory
agencies, and other governmental bodies. It is customary to think of the business system in
terms of a national economy, such as the UK, but in a globalizing world we need to recognize
the ways in which the system operates across borders and creates the interconnectedness of
nations. Thus, we may refer to the international (or even global) business system.
A further meaning of business is invoked when we refer to the ‘business community’ or per-
haps ‘business class’. This suggests that businesses constitute a distinctive group within society
and that, for some purposes, individual business organizations may find it advantageous to
work together to pursue shared interests or goals. For example, there may be a desire within
the business community to present a common position in order to influence some aspect of
government economic policy, such as a decision on taxation, interest rates, or business regula-
tion. Such a common position might be presented by a collective business organization like the
Confederation of British Industry (CBI). The business community may also now be thought
of as spanning national borders, such as in the form of the annual meetings of the World
Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos. However, there are often conflicting interests within the
business community, for example, between renewable energy companies and oil producers in
relation to carbon pricing.
Everybody would agree that Amazon is an example of a business organization, but there would
be much less agreement on whether the term applies also to the police force, which is part of
the state or ‘public sector’. Thinking about these two examples can help us to clarify the mean-
ing of business and to distinguish narrow and broad definitions. The reason for thinking that
the police force is not a business arises from the common association between business, pri-
vate ownership, paying customers, competition, and the profit motive. Citizens do not pay for
policing services in the form of a market price that is set at a level to yield a profit, and the po-
lice do not face any competitors for customers (indeed the direct recipients of police services,
crime suspects, are not really ‘customers’ at all in the sense of choosing to use the service). But
this is a narrow view of business that equates it with a specific legal form and the private sector.
A broad view of business is based on thinking of business as an activity. If we step back from
the particular line of business that Amazon is in, we can describe business in general terms as
10 Introduction
stake. There is never likely to be unanimous agreement, hence the nature of the business sys-
tem is always an intensely political issue. For example, the global economic recession, initially
triggered by problems in the financial sector in 2008, reignited fierce political controversy over
whether the crisis demonstrated the failure of the ‘neoliberal’ economic model that had been
in place since the 1980s, and the need for government intervention to limit the recession and
to regulate the market, particularly the banking sector. This has been bound up with contro-
versy about austerity, the slow recovery and stagnating living standards, growing inequality
and, as we have seen, a backlash against globalization. In other words, the business model is
now open to question.
DIVERSITY What alternatives are available to society in deciding a framework of rules and
institutions within which business operates? In the real world societies differ from each other
in complex ways, but it is possible to identify some broad principles and mechanisms. To start
with we can distinguish between centralized and decentralized systems. Centralized allocation
of resources is undertaken by government or the state, whereas the market is a decentralized
mechanism. Other decentralized mechanisms are: voluntary agencies and charities (third sec-
tor), and the ‘informal economy’. These alternatives can be illustrated through the example
of healthcare.
The market or capitalist system operates on the basis of private property, voluntary ex-
change, competition, and the profit motive. In a market for healthcare, services are offered
by private companies which compete with one another for sales to paying customers, and the
main purpose of business is to make a profit. In a pure market, individuals have to be self-
reliant in meeting their own needs for healthcare through their ability to pay, e.g. through
private insurance. The level of resources allocated to healthcare and the mix of services is
determined by the decentralized interaction of buyers and sellers.
Government or the state provides an alternative mechanism to the market for allocating
resources. Government can use its tax-raising powers to provide public services to citizens on
the basis of criteria other than ability to pay and profitability. For example, the UK National
Health Service (NHS) is essentially a tax-funded system that operates on the basis of equal
treatment for equal need, and medical need replaces profit as the purpose of the business. In
effect, taxpayers contribute to a common fund and all citizens are able to draw on the fund in
the form of medical treatment on the basis of need, irrespective of the amount they have paid
in. The level of resources allocated to healthcare is determined in a centralized way through
government budget decisions, and the mix of services is determined by a central regulatory
body coupled with decentralized assessments of clinical need by medical practitioners.
The voluntary, or third, sector provides an alternative decentralized mechanism for allocat-
ing resources where the purpose is to meet certain categories of need rather than to make a
profit, though it is small in comparison with the private and public sectors. Funding is pro-
vided by voluntary donations and sometimes by government grants, and services are provided
often on a last resort basis where individuals have no access to services provided through the
market or government. For example, MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières) provides emergency
medical assistance in circumstances of civil conflict or natural disaster, usually in poor coun-
tries. However, there is a role for the voluntary provision of health services even in one of the
richest countries in the world, the US, because of the shortcomings of both the market and
government in meeting the needs of the poor in that society.
Charities and private sector companies also operate in partnership with the public sector,
entering into contractual arrangements to deliver public services in areas such as social care,
homelessness, welfare-to-work, prison services, and drug addiction. This model is often re-
ferred to as the ‘enabling state’: the state funds the service but delivery is delegated to third
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A second principle vital to modern music is that of “thematic
development.” By this is meant, first, the existence in the music of
certain salient, easily recognizable groups of tones, called motifs,
subjects, or themes, which are presented to the hearer at the
outset, and impressed upon him by their unique individuality of cut;
and second, that subsequent elaboration of these themes, in varied
but still recognizable forms, which corresponds closely with the
process by which an essayist develops an idea, a mathematician
proves a theorem, or a preacher elucidates a text. It is interesting to
note that the German word “Satz,” often used by musicians to mean
“a theme,” signifies primarily a thesis or proposition in logic, while
“Durchführung,” used to describe the development of the theme,
means primarily a leading-through or bringing to an issue. Thus the
process of thematic development in music is much like any other
process of intellectual statement and proof. Now it is evident that
this process, which is indispensable to all the higher intellectual
forms of music, requires in the first place definite, concise, and
memorable themes, since it is impossible to discuss what one fails to
grasp, or after grasping, forgets. As the proverb says, the preparer
of a ragout of hare must “first catch his hare.” Similarly musicians,
before they could make their music logical, had to catch their
themes. But as musical material up to the time of Palestrina never
was definite or memorable, the first requisite of thematic music was
some principle by which themes could be defined. This principle was
found in the time-measurement of tones. So soon as a group of
tones were placed in measured relations of duration to one another,
an individual theme emerged, and could be elaborated. The second
great conquest of modern music, then, was the conquest of the
definite theme or motif, strictly measured in time, and of those
devices by which it could be developed in an extended and logical
discourse.
The third notable achievement of seventeenth century composers
was the emancipation of music from servitude to poetry, and the
establishment of it as an independent art. In one sense this was but
a natural outcome of its new qualities of harmonic and thematic
definition, lacking which it could never reach independence. So long
as it remained in itself vague, amorphous, inchoate, it was
constrained to be but a hand-maid, to content itself with lending
eloquence or atmosphere to the utterances of its sister art; but this
condition of dependence, however inevitable for a time, was
nevertheless unfortunate, and bound to be eventually outlived.
Music is always fatally handicapped by association with words. In the
first place, words impose upon it a concrete meaning immeasurably
more trite, prosaic, and limited than that abstract and indefinable
meaning to the heart and mind which is its proper prerogative; the
expressive power of music really begins where that of poetry fails
and ceases. In the second place, the limitations of all vocal music
are in many ways serious. Not only are voices incapable of sounding
readily and with certainty many intervals, but they are confined to a
range of a little over three octaves, and to phrases short enough not
to overtax the breath. Instruments are free from all these
disqualifications. They produce pure tones, without words, the most
celestial of artistic materials; they can sound any interval; they
extend over a range of more than seven octaves, from the deep
bass of the organ or contrabass to the shrill and immaterial treble of
the piccolo; and the breadth of the phrases they can produce is
limited not by their own mechanism, but only by the power of
intellectual synthesis possessed by listeners. For all these reasons,
instruments are the ideal media for producing music; and never until
they supplanted voices could music reach its complete stature as a
mature and self-sufficient art, leaning on no crutch, borrowing no
raison d’être, but making by its own legitimate means its own unique
effects.
The task of seventeenth century musicians was, then, in large part,
the establishment of tonality and the hierarchy of keys, contrasted
with one another, but accessible by modulation; the crystallization,
by means of both harmonic and metrical definition, of individual
themes out of the amorphous tonal matrix of previous eras, and the
exploration of means for building up these themes into coherent
organisms; and lastly the emancipation of the art thus brought into
full life from the tyranny of association with words and voices. This
was an immense task; and it is not to be wondered at that most of
the men engaged in it never attained mastery enough to give them
great personal prominence. Theirs was a time of beginnings, of
preparation for novel and unprecedented achievements. The early
opera-writers, the Italian violinists, the German organists, and the
clavichord and harpsichord writers of that period, men like Cavaliere
and Caccini, Corelli and Scarlatti, Sweelinck and Frescobaldi, Purcell,
Kuhnau, and Couperin, are chiefly known to us as preparers of the
soil, and sowers of the seed, for a harvest which was gathered by
later, and probably greater, though not more honorable men. The
first composer after Palestrina who like him overtopped all his
fellows, and brought to its culmination another great period, was
Johann Sebastian Bach.
In Bach’s style we find, in addition to the polyphonic or many-voiced
texture of Palestrina, a thematic pointedness and logic and a
harmonic structure which are entirely unforeshadowed in the older
man. The fugue, a form which he carried to its highest pitch, and
which was admirably suited to his genius, is in certain respects allied
to the earlier style, though in others wholly modern. Like the
ecclesiastical forms of Palestrina, it is of the basket-work type of
texture. One voice begins alone, others enter in succession,and all
wind in and out amongst one another almost as intricately as in a
sixteenth century madrigal. On the other hand, the fugue as a whole
begins and ends in some one key, and throughout its progress
modulates from key to key with well-planned contrasts and firmly-
controlled movement. Moreover, a single definite theme or subject
appears at the outset of the piece, and stands prominently forth
through its whole extent; it is announced by the first voice, repeated
at a different pitch in the answer of the second, reiterated again by
the third and fourth, and subsequently made the basis of an
ingenious, varied, and extended development. Finally, although
some of Bach’s fugues are vocal, most of them are written either for
organ or for clavichord. In all these respects his work is modern, and
perhaps most of all is it modern in its inexorable logic, its subtlety
and variety, and in its poignant, deeply emotional expressiveness,
which is always held within the bounds necessary to supreme
architectural beauty. The period of Bach and his precursors,
sometimes called the “polyphonic-harmonic” period, because in it
the modern harmonic system was grafted upon the polyphony of
Palestrina, remains to-day, from some points of view, the purest and
noblest period of musical history.
All the time that Bach, in the privacy of an obscure German town,
was writing his wonderfully intricate and beautiful polyphonic music,
the world about him, oblivious, was seeking out a quite different
type of art. It is a surprising fact that Bach’s compositions were
virtually unknown for fifty years after his death, and might have
remained so permanently had they not been “discovered” by
appreciative students, much as the receptacles of classical lore were
discovered in the Renaissance after the long darkness of the Middle
Ages, and made the basis of an intellectual revival. Bach’s great
works, too, were full of an undying vitality; but for a long time their
potency had to remain latent, because men were occupied with
another order of art, a different set of problems, an alien style. Ever
since the Florentine revolution, when the polyphonic texture of
mediæval music was abandoned for a simple monodic or one-voiced
style, in which a melody is accompanied by a series of chords, much
of the musical genius of the world had been devoted to the
development of eloquent single melodies, and of suitable harmonic
backgrounds for them. With the systematization of harmony and the
establishment of definite themes this type of art became mature.
Composers discerned the possibility of building up whole movements
to which interest could be given by the statement and development
of one or more themes, contrasted both in character and in key.
They saw that the whole could be unified by general qualities of
style, by recurrence of the themes, and, above all, by being made to
embody, in the long run, a single tonality, though with momentary
departures from it for the sake of variety. Working out their idea,
they devised a type of structure which has remained up to this day
the highest and most widely useful of all musical forms. The
essential features of “sonata-form,” as it is called, are, in the first
place, the Exposition of two themes or subjects of discourse,
contrasting both in character and in key; in the second place, the
Development of these themes, the exploitation of their latent
possibilities; in the third place, Restatement of them, in the central
key of the movement, bringing all to a point, and completing the
cycle of Statement, Argument, and Summary. Sonata-form, of which
it is easy to see the naturalness and beauty, depends for its unity,
not on the equal interplay of many voices, like the older polyphonic
forms, but on the saliency, cumulative development, and harmonic
inter-relations, of single themes. We may, therefore, call the great
period of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, the period in which the
sonata-form attained its full maturity, the “harmonic period,” or, in
view of the complete round or circuit of themes its forms
exemplified, the “cyclical-form period.” It culminated in the early
years of the nineteenth century, in the grand works of Beethoven’s
maturity.
After Beethoven, music began to ramify in so many directions that it
is impossible to classify its phases in a hard-and-fast series. It had
its romanticists, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin, who
uttered with freer passion and poetry the emotional and spiritual
meanings already heard in Beethoven. It had its realists, notably
Berlioz and Liszt, who, attempting to divert it into the realm of
pictorial delineation and description, have been followed by all the
horde of contemporary writers of programme-music. It had its
nationalists, men like Glinka, Smetana, and in our own day, Grieg
and Dvořák, who sought to impress upon its speech a local accent.
Above all, it had one great master, Brahms, who, assimilating the
polyphony of Bach, the architectonic structure of Beethoven, and the
romantic ardor of Schumann, added to them all his own austere
beauty and profound feeling. But we are too near these later
masters to get any general, justly-proportioned view of them. It is
on the horizon only that mountains cease to be solitary peaks, and
become ranges, the trend and disposition of which can be accurately
plotted on the maps. The general tendency of musical evolution,
down to Beethoven so clearly traceable, so obviously continuous,
becomes after him bafflingly complex.
Fortunately, this complexity need not embarrass our present
undertaking. We have seen how, in the gradual and laborious, but
incessant and inevitable growth of musical art, period succeeded
period as the artistic faculty of man constantly discerned new
possibilities of beauty, sensuous, expressive, and æsthetic, in the
tonal material with which it dealt. We have seen how this evolution
tended always from the indefinite, incoherent, and homogeneous
toward the definite, coherent, and heterogeneous; and how it
tended to embody ever higher and higher values, beginning with the
mere sense-stimulations of savages and leading up to the highly
complex and intellectual sound-fabric of Beethoven, in which the
sensuous and emotional values are held ever subordinate to the
æsthetic. We have examined, briefly and summarily, the special
characteristics of the successive periods into which the great
evolution has been divided by those critical points which the nature
of its material determined. With the general view of musical history
thus gained held clearly in mind, we may now profitably pass to that
more detailed study of the great period of Beethoven, the golden
age of pure music, which is the especial task before us.
It will be necessary, however, to linger still a little longer on the
threshold, in order to examine in more detail yet the two scarcely
less interesting periods which preceded it,—the periods of Palestrina
and Bach,—and to define yet more precisely those fundamental
principles of pure music on the efficacy of which its glory depended.
FOOTNOTES:
It has been often pointed out by historians and critics that in their
early stages the arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting were
the servants of religion. Nursed through their infancy by the
cherishing hand of the church, they emerged into the secular world
only with their comparative maturity. Architecture, which in our day
and country embodies itself chiefly in great civic and mercantile
buildings, began with the temples of the pagan Greeks and the
cathedrals of the mediæval Christians. Sculpture for the most part
delineated, in antiquity, Egyptian or Greek gods and goddesses; and
in the middle ages, Christian saints. Even painting, which at the
Renaissance became for all time a secular art, inspired by its own
ideals and controlled only by intrinsic conditions, commenced by
picturing on mediæval altar-pieces and frescoes the heroes of sacred
story, with their upturned eyes and their clasped hands, and by
symbolizing the dogmas or illustrating the narratives of its task-
master, religion. J. A. Symonds, in the third part of his “Renaissance
in Italy,” in which he describes at length this universal dependence of
art, in its early stages, on the church, offers the following plausible
explanation of it: “Art aims at expressing an ideal; and this ideal is
the transfiguration of human elements into something nobler, felt
and apprehended by the imagination. Such an ideal, such an all-
embracing glorification of humanity, exists for simple and
unsophisticated societies only in the forms of religion.”[7] It is not,
indeed, until art, nurtured in cloisters, acquires definite aims,
technical methods, and self-confidence, that it can put off its
dependence on ecclesiastical aid, at first favorable but eventually
restrictive, and essay a free life.
To this general rule music is no exception—mediæval music was the
child, nursling, and hand-maid of the Church. It is true that there did
grow up, in the lyrical songs of troubadours and minstrels, a kind of
popular music that had in many respects more vitality, individuality,
and beauty than the more conventional ecclesiastical art; and that
the latter, at many stages in its development, had to draw fresh
inspiration from the humble popular minstrels. But in the middle
ages, when the common people were entirely illiterate, and all
intellectual concerns were in the hands of priests, who alone could
read, write, and preserve manuscripts and artistic traditions, it was
inevitable that the only recognized music, stamped with the seal of
age and authority, should be that of the ecclesiastical choristers. The
student of the infancy of music has to direct his attention, not to the
mediæval world at large, but to the cathedrals and the monasteries
of that intensely clerical age.
For the modern mind, permeated as it is with the instincts of liberty
and individualism, and perhaps especially for the American mind,
naturally radical and irreverent, it is difficult to conceive the degree
in which all the rites, customs, and beliefs of the mediæval Catholic
Church were matters of traditional authority. There was not a word
of the liturgy, not a tone of the plain chant to which it was sung, not
a gesture of the priest nor a genuflexion of the worshippers, that
was not prescribed by what was considered supreme dictation and
hallowed by immemorial practice.[8] The liturgy, or text of the Mass,
the skeleton and fixed basis, so to speak, of the ritual as a whole,
began to take shape in the hands of the apostles themselves; was
developed by a gradual accretion of prayers, hymns, responses, and
readings from Scripture; was translated into Latin and adopted by
the Roman Church; and became fixed in practically its present form
so early as the end of the sixth century. When we consider the
almost superstitious regard in which its great antiquity caused it to
be held, and when we reflect that the musical setting used with it
was considered a mere appanage to the sacred words, we can
understand the slow development of music in the first eleven
centuries of the Christian era. In taking its first steps music was not
merely hampered by its own uncertainty and infantile feebleness; it
was paralyzed by servile dependence on a text swathed within the
bandages of priestly convention.
The only form of music used in the Church, up to the beginning of
the twelfth century, the only form of music ever given its official
sanction, was the Gregorian chant or plain song, which consists in a
single unaccompanied series of tones set to the liturgic text, intoned
by priest or choristers, and for many centuries used exclusively
throughout the entire service. It has not only no harmony, but,
properly speaking, no meter or rhythm, being dependent for time-
measurement on the prose text it accompanies. “It follows” says Mr.
Dickinson,[9] “the phrasing, the emphasis, and the natural inflections
of the voice in reciting the text, at the same time that it idealizes
them. It is a sort of heightened form of speech, a musical
declamation, having for its object the intensifying of the emotional
powers of ordinary spoken language. It stands to true song or tune
in much the same relation as prose to verse, less impassioned, more
reflective, yet capable of moving the heart like eloquence.” Having
neither harmonic nor metrical relationship, it had, of course, no
proper structure of its own; and so long as it was used in this
primary way, sung in unison or even in two parts at the interval of
an octave, there was little about it that could properly be called
musical at all.
But after a while it occurred to some one to let a second set of
voices sing the same chant at an interval of a fifth above the first.
[10] This scheme, which, simple as it was, contained the seeds of
wonderful developments, was probably first recommended by
several practical advantages. When the chant was sung by two
choirs, one made up of the high voices (soprano and tenors) and the
other of the low voices (contraltos and basses) the interval of the
octave was practically inconvenient because the low voices could not
use their highest tones without throwing the high voices out of
range, and the high voices could not use their lowest tones without
similarly embarrassing the low ones. When the interval of the fifth
was used, on the contrary, practically all the tones in both ranges,
which are by nature about a fifth apart,[11] became available. This
was a very practical argument in favor of chanting “at the fifth.” An
even stronger one was the fact that, while fifths, like octaves, are
harmonious and pleasant to the ear, without harshness or
discordance, they are richer than octaves, and their constituents
stand out distinct instead of merging into one impression, as do
tones an octave apart; so that the practice of Organum, or chanting
at the fifth, was harmonically sweet and full as well as melodically
interesting. Organum came therefore into general and wide use in
the mediæval church. Hucbald, a monkish writer of the tenth
century, gives the following example of a fragment of plain chant
“organized,” or sung by two voices a fifth apart:
FIGURE III.
Here the first three chords, a modern musician would say, are in as
many keys. The first is the triad of A-major, the second that of G-
major, and the third that of F-major. The coherence of the passage
depends, in fact, entirely on the melodies; the chords they form
have no harmonic cohesiveness. For the old composers, in whose
scores hundreds of such passages may be found, harmony was still
a sensuous, not an intellectual or æsthetic agent.
Another peculiarity of their harmonic style resulted from their
attitude toward dissonances, or chords containing harsh intervals.
Dissonance, as we shall have frequent occasion to see, plays an
important part in modern music, both as an indispensable element in
design and as a means of peculiar emotional expressiveness. In the
sixteenth century, on the contrary, dissonances were admitted in the
harmonic fabric but sparingly, and when admitted were subject to
stringent rules, the purpose of which was to mollify their harshness.
The result was not only still further to preclude the sense of
harmonic sequence and coherence so essential to modern ears, and
produced largely by the skilful use of dissonance merging into
consonance, but also to limit the expressive powers of music to that
range of feeling which is aroused by the purest, clearest, and most
mellifluous chords sounding continuously, without contrast or relief.
But if the music of the sixteenth century was lacking in harmonic
cogency and intensity, it was not for that reason either incoherent or
inexpressive. It had its own sort of coherence, its own type of
eloquence, both depending on melodic rather than on harmonic
qualities. Music was to Palestrina and his fellows entirely a matter of
melody, not of harmony at all. The reader needs only to glance
again at Figure III, attending not to the chords and their sequence,
but to the individual voices, one after another, to see that in their
own way the phrases hang together firmly, and say efficiently what
they mean. Each of the four voices has an intelligible and expressive
part, and if together they sound a little strange, singly they are
eminently good. The more one studies this old music the more one
realizes that it is all melody; from beginning to end, from top to
bottom, the mediæval scores sing. They are not, like many modern
works, full of inert, lifeless matter, tones put in to fill out the
harmonies, and having no melodic excuse for being. In the modern
monophonic style, in which but one melody sings, the remaining
parts are almost inevitably treated by the composer as affording
rather a logical sequence of harmonies than a subsidiary tissue of
melodic strands. In the sixteenth century, on the other hand,
harmony was the accident, melody the essence; any chord would do
very well in any place, provided it were consonant enough not to
offend the ear; but every tone must have a melodic reason for
being; it must be a point in a line; all the lines must be conducted
with draughtsman-like deftness and economy. Melodic life is
accordingly the supreme trait of the style well named polyphonic.
And yet, here we encounter still another difficulty introduced by
modern habits of thought. To us nowadays melody means, not
merely a series of tones having that sort of elementary
consecutiveness which we find in Palestrina, for example, but a
series of tones divided up into several definite segments which in
someway balance, complement, and complete one another. The first
phrase of “Yankee Doodle” has “elementary consecutiveness,” but it
does not satisfy our melodic sense. We must add the second phrase,
equal to it in length, which echoes and reinforces it, and the third
phrase, twice as long as either, which rounds out the whole tune to a
complete period. In short, just as harmony involves for us chord
structure and inter-relation, melody involves for us metrical balance,
response, symmetry—that recognizable recurrence, to use the most
general term possible, which we call “rhythm.” Mere eloquent
intoning, without repetition and balance of phrases, is to us no more
“tune” than prose is verse. Here again we are in danger of letting
our own habits of thought confuse our understanding of an
unfamiliar type of art. The truth is, Palestrina does not write “tunes,”
in the modern sense of the word. He lived and wrote before musical
evolution had given the world that principle of metrical structure so
essential to modern music; and his style, therefore, lacks definite
meter, lacks all rhythm save that vague one superposed upon it by
his Latin prose text. His music, devoid of any regular segmental
division, is indeed a sort of tonal prose, as massive and majestic as
the “Religio Medici.”
One other technical peculiarity of the music of the polyphonic period
deserves notice here, as it involved a principle destined to assume
great importance in later stages of art. The polyphonic writers often
introduced successive voices with an identical formula of notes,
which by repetition came to have somewhat the virtue of a motif or
subject in giving to the music rationality and sequence. They had not
as yet, to be sure, enough experience in composing definite themes
strictly measured in time to make these embryonic motifs either very
long or very distinct, but they did make and utilize subjects striking
enough to be remembered and recognized. In this way they
introduced the important device of “Imitation.” This imitating of one
part by another, even when crudely carried out, gave a certain air of
intention and fore-thought to what without it would have been a
haphazard utterance of tones, and in later times, when developed to
a high pitch of perfection in the fugue and allied forms, became a
powerful agent for securing intelligibility. Meanwhile, as we have
seen, the intelligibility of the sixteenth-century music depended
chiefly on the fine melodic cogency and expressiveness of its
individual voice parts. Although time-measurement was well
understood, melody was without metrical structure and rhythmic
organization. Harmony was the art of making pleasant sounds by
bringing the voices together, at prominent moments, on consonant
chords; it took no heed of chord relation, of tonality, or of orderly
modulation; and it used dissonance with extreme conservatism.
Such, in sum, were the most notable technical peculiarities of that
polyphonic period which Palestrina brought to its culmination.
Giovanni Pierluigi Sante da Palestrina, named Palestrina from the
place of his birth, which was a small town in the Campagna not far
from Rome, was born of humble parents about the year 1524. About
1550 he went to Rome as teacher of the boy-singers in the Capella
Giulia of the Vatican. All the rest of his life was spent in Rome, in
various posts in the service of the church, and in studious and
uneventful labor at his great compositions. Although a married man,
he was made in 1554 one of the singers in the Papal choir by Pope
Julius III, to whom he had dedicated a set of masses; on the
accession of Pope Paul IV a year later he was dismissed, and
became ill with anxiety as to the support of his growing family; he
was nevertheless almost immediately appointed music-director of
the Lateran Church, and later he held successively the posts of
music-director in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, “Composer to
the Pontifical Choir,” leader of the choir of St. Peter’s, and music-
director to Cardinal Aldobrandini. Aside from these meagre and arid
details, unfortunately, little is known of the man Palestrina. His
private life is almost a blank. The one story oftenest told of him, that
his Mass of Pope Marcellus, produced in 1565, was written to
convince the reforming Council of Trent of the possibility of purging
church music of the trivialities and abuses which had crept into it,
has been discredited by recent historians. Mythical also seems to be
the story of Palestrina’s one great popular triumph, in 1575, a year
of jubilee, when fifteen hundred residents of the composer’s native
town are said to have entered Rome in three companies, singing his
works, and led by himself. The story is a severe tax on the credulity
of anyone whose ideas of chorus-singing are based on modern
methods.
In character Palestrina was devout, pious, frugal, and industrious.
Though so few records exist, we can guess his industry from the
mass of the work he achieved, and his honor and sense of
responsibility from his anxiety when the support of his family
seemed in danger. As to his piety, all his music is one eloquent
demonstration of it. Nor is it without verbal testimony in the
dedications and inscriptions on his manuscripts. In dedicating his
first book of motets to Cardinal d’Este he expressed his artistic
convictions as follows: “Music exerts a great influence on the minds
of mankind, and is intended not only to cheer these, but also to
guide and control them, a statement which has not only been made
by the ancients, but which is found equally true to-day. The sharper
blame, therefore, do those deserve who misemploy so great and
splendid a gift of God in light or unworthy things, and thereby excite
men, who of themselves are inclined to all evil, to sin and misdoing.
As regards myself, I have from youth been affrighted at such misuse,
and anxiously have I avoided giving forth anything which could lead
anyone to become more wicked or godless. All the more should I,
now that I have attained to riper years, and am not far removed
from old age, place my entire thoughts on lofty, earnest things, such
as are worthy of a Christian.” When, in 1594, Palestrina died, almost
his last words, whispered to his son Igino, directed the publication of
his latest manuscript works, “to the glory of the most high God, and
the worship of his holy temple.”
A sentence in the dedication by Palestrina just cited affords us as
serviceable a key as we could desire to the fundamental temper or
mood of mind which underlay the type of art he represents. The
technical peculiarities of this art already traced in the foregoing
pages, do not in themselves explain it; they are, indeed, but
manifestations of a deeper spirit underneath, a spirit that was as
characteristic of the mediæval mind as idealism is of the modern
mind. Incommensurate as were the technical resources of the
mediæval composer with ours, their whole mental temper and
outlook upon life was in even more striking contrast with the modern
attitude. We have, therefore, next to ask: What was the most
characteristic peculiarity of this age? What was its most pervasive
general trait? What was the one dominant quality in which most of
Palestrina’s contemporaries, for all their minor differences, were
alike?
Palestrina himself suggests the answer to such questions. “The
sharper blame, therefore,” he writes, “do those deserve who
misemploy so great and splendid a gift of God in light or unworthy
things, and thereby excite men, who of themselves are inclined to all
evil, to sin and misdoing.” This setting in antithesis of “men, who of
themselves are inclined to all evil,” with the attribution of a “great
and splendid gift” to a God conceived as remote from men though
beneficent to them, exemplifies the essence of that mediæval view
of life which we wish to understand, and for which perhaps the best
single name is mysticism. The mystic begins his philosophy with a
sharp sundering of himself, considered as an individual existing in
time and space, with earthly body, finite mind, and human passions,
from what he considers supreme, formless, and eternal good. In
common with other men, he has his instinctive perceptions of the
divine; but unlike other men he cuts off very sharply the divine thus
perceived from the real world in which he eats and drinks, works
and plays, lives and dies. His is a world of strong contrasts, of
extreme antithesis—the world that mystical terminology divides into
“apparent and real,” “divine and carnal,” “temporal and eternal.” His
intuition of what is beyond the veil of mortality, absolute,
permanent, serves only to emphasize more poignantly his own
frailty, partiality, and transience. He not only hypostatizes his own
ideal, his dream and aspiration of what ought to be, making of it, as
all men do, a real objective existence, but he then cuts it off from
himself, makes it a touchstone of all the dross that in him exists
alongside the pure gold, and while he attributes all virtue to this
“other” or “beyond” projected by his unconscious imagination,
reserves to his present actual self, as directly known, all wickedness,
sin, and failure. God is perfect, but remote; man is near—and base.
This was the characteristic attitude of religious-minded men in the
middle ages. If to us it may seem pathetically childish and
superstitious, we should not judge it without remembering the epoch
of which it was a part. When we reconstruct in imagination that
historic moment, that peculiar inheritance and environment of the
sixteenth century Europeans, it is hard to conceive how else they
could have interpreted the world. Theirs was an age, we must
remind ourselves, of violence and bloodshed, of greed, hypocrisy,
lust, and faithlessness. Craft and cruelty reigned in places of power,
and the minds of the common people groped in the obscurity of
gross ignorance, made even darker by fitful flashes of superstition.
The poor were ground down by tyrannies and oppressions, the
powerful were tormented by constant dread of treachery and
assassination. Plagues and pestilence, war and famine and drought,
made physical existence miserable; priestly bigotry and dogmatism
crushed all mental initiative. It is not surprising that humanity, in the
midst of such conditions, failed to recognize, as the source of its
beliefs, its own latent virtue; the wonder is rather that it succeeded
in rising at all to the intuition of a holiness which, by a natural error,
it conceived as entirely severed from itself. It was much to arrive at
this point. The object of the present analysis is not to discredit the
mediæval conception of the world, but, by pointing out its
peculiarities, to throw light on the music which was one of its
profoundest utterances.
The most familiar, and in some respects the most characteristic,
element of mysticism is its ecstatic, devout attitude towards the
deity or Absolute it worships. The mystic throws himself on the
ground before his God, so to speak, in an ecstasy of complete self-
abandonment and surrender. He is utterly prone, passive, will-less.
His worship is the most complete, the most devoted worship of
which there is record. The Greek pagans might sacrifice a lamb or an
ox at the altars of their gods, the mystic sacrifices nothing less than
himself, his very personality. He desires no reciprocal relations with
his deity, makes no reservations in his commerce with it, retains no
claim to independence, seeks no special favors; what he longs for,
whole-heartedly and with a passionate fervor, is complete
absorption, utter annihilation. In the trances of the devotees,
consciousness dwindles to a point, all sense of individuality lapses,
perception, sensation, thought even, flag and cease, and there
remains only a vast, vague sense of the infinite self in which the
human self is dissolved and obliterated.
So prominent a feature in this longing or absorption in the infinite,
however, was the characteristic mystical condemnation of the finite,
that an account of the relations of mystical belief and practice to the
affairs of actual life reduces itself largely to a series of negative
statements. Closely connected with the dogma of the supreme worth
of the absolute, and producing even more conspicuous effects than
that, was the obverse dogma of the worthlessness of the immediate,
of whatever could be called “this,” “now,” or “here.” Love of God was
considered to involve contempt of man, and since man was nearer,
more immediate in experience, than God, mysticism expressed itself,
historically, very largely in negations. It acted, in all departments of
life, and on all planes—the physical, the intellectual, and the
emotional or spiritual—as an anti-naturalistic force, for which,
perhaps, the best general name is asceticism.
On the physical plane, asceticism took the form of abstinence and
mortification of the flesh. In its milder phases it prompted merely
the refusal of all the natural calls of instinct and appetite. Because it
was natural to hunger, asceticism required men to fast; because to
sleep was natural, it counselled vigils; because men naturally enjoy
women’s love, material well-being, and personal initiative, monastic
orders imposed the triple oath of celibacy, poverty, and obedience.
Of course it is true that there were positive benefits to be derived
from all these modes of discipline, and that much could be argued in
their favor by mere common-sense; but over and above their
positive virtues there was about them an opposition to nature, a
violence to human instincts, that even more irresistibly commended
them to true ascetics. A still further application of the same principle