This paper explores the relationship between management and markets through an examination of the experiences of an Australian family-owned sugar farm in Queensland’s Burdekin region; an area of delta-river lands akin to the Mississippi delta of Louisiana. In considering what causes businesses like BT Farms to “make or buy,” that is, to vertically integrate or outsources to the market, this paper draws on the “transaction cost economics” pioneered by Oliver Williamson and subsequently exploited by Alfred Chandler. It also, however, draws on the pioneering work of John F. Mee, who searched for the source of a “dynamic economy” in the relationship between “the cumulative forces in the environment” and “the nature of management philosophy applied to business and industrial enterprises.”
