Financehome Maybe there is no one answer. Solutions alter with differing circumstances. The town of Corby which until 1934 was a village has today, thanks to the establishment of an iron and steel works in that year, a population heading for 40,000. Houses, sports fields, and other amenities had to be provided by the company, but as the community develops, encouraged by the company, local initiative should be developing local amenities. How, for example, to adjust the problems of differing rents between Companysubsidized houses and those provided by the Town Council? That is one aspect. There are cases, especially overseas, where a community development is completely separated from the dominating local employer and where it is believed that the best 'sense of community' can be assured in this way. A group recently studying the playing field problem came quite simply to the conclusion that the proper answer to the question was simply that the management of an individual company, using its judgement and at the psychological moment, should hand over its fields for the use of the community. There is a further aspect of managing for the community which deserves consideration. That is the matter of company executives identifying themselves with public and local interests by doing voluntary service. Local Government, for example, needs more and more the help of trained minds and, in Britain especially, there are a great number of institutions and organizations completely dependent on unpaid assistance. Is it not management's task to make sure that such time will in fact be available? 'Don't bother me', 'I mind my own business' is so often the plaint of the overworked manager who, at the end of the day, shuts himself off from every sort of social obligation. This is wrong. The duty of management to the community in this aspect is clear : business organization should be such that time is made for such service to be possible. Mutually exclusive: those two words really contain within them the nub of the matter of management for the community. The truth surely is that industry and commerce (and, hence, industrial and commercial management) and the community cannot any longer be mutually exclusive. Both sides must get on their allotted tasks industry and commerce to prosper in the interests of the community and the community to develop its character and social life in the interests of the businesses that flourish within it. In industrial and commercial society today nobody can really pursue a set of entirely exclusive interests : the pace and ramifications of modern life make this so. In writing of business management and the State there is a risk that the emphasis might be placed the wrong way round: that is to say on how the State manages for business. The workings of the State are so apparent everywhere and the tentacles of government reach into so many business activities that management, even should it wish to go its own way, cannot ignore this most important of all postSecond World War trends. to buy a house