Business categories a la Times [London, UK]

Following up on our previous blog-entry to establish as part of the pragmatics associated with our economics theorizing for USE (Utilize Synergic Enterprises--a game we are inventing as we go), we put forward a working set of bizcats regarding "sectors" (in various contexts we discovered expressions "economic sectors," "industrial sectors," and "business sectors" can all mean what we want simply to call "sectors"). In our usage/s, sectors are sectors of an economy (whether it's the global economic order or a specific national or regional economy); an economy is usually composed of sectors (in a hypothetical pure-monocultural economy there would be only one sector--let's say coffee cultivation, harvesting, and export).

Now, for symmetry's sake, we hypthesize that all sectors are composed of industries (so, strictly speaking, in our framework here there are no "industrial sectors," rather only sectors, subsectors perhaps, both in turn being composed of specific industries). Thus, in my extreme hypothetical of a pure mono(agri)culture, we could entertain an economy with only one sector where three industries derive from

1.) coffee growing (let's say, this subsector or particular industry is composed of 3,000 small-grower family-farms with hired hands,

2.) coffee-harvesting (let's say there are 20 companies that contract to harvest or that rent machinery for mechanized harvesting for some of the growers); and

3.) coffee-exporting (let's say, there are 4 companies that send trucks to the growers' farms with which they have contracts to load the sacked coffee beans, transport the product to the port city where only the same companies' ships harbour, load the unprocessed beans onto the coffee-export ships). And away they sail, let's say, to Bordeaux, France.

We could call this a single-sector coffee economy (monocultural) with three diverse industries within it--the coffee industry of small growers who are family-farmers (compare Herman Dooyeweerd, NCTT on the "family farm" as a hybrid of two different societal spheres ... the family and the farm as a business) some of whom employ hired hands seasonally, the second industry of mechanized coffee-harvesting companies, and the coffee industry specialized as trucking-shipping companies.

For any economy, judgment calls will have to be made to sort out what constitutes a sector, perhaps subsectors and/or industries, and finally companies. Of course the further complication arises often enuff, of multi-sectoral companies, multi-subsectoral companies, and multi-industry companies. The term "diversification" is often used to designate companies that exhibit these phenomena, these larger structural relationships to an economy from within it.

With all the foregoing discussion in mind, please now consider The Times's construction of a set of bizcats that, from my point of view here, wobbles between concepts of sector, subsector, and industry. How would you hierarchize an economics classifaction for each of the items below?

* Banking & Finance

* Construction & Property

* Consumer Goods

* Engineering

* Health

* Industrials

* Leisure

* Media

* Natural Resources

* Retailing

* Support Services

* Technology

* Telecoms

* Transport

* Utilities