Productive enterprises require routinized supervision that speculative activities avoid.

Evidence

Employment of workers involves supervision, delegation, and control on a scale which many enterprises in the sphere of circulation largely avoided. Usury, speculation, landlordism, and theft are usually intermittent activities, lacking the routinized preoccupations of most productive enterprises. Here the main problems concern extraction of rents or debts from clients, establishing cooperative relations with partners, and negotiating obstacles imposed by public authorities. In a place like Nima, even more than in Ghana generally, legal sanction for contracts is weak or non-existent, so that most activities are outside the law, whether or not they self-consciously infringe it. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2379

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes productive enterprises from circulation activities by their control and supervision demands — a useful conceptual distinction.