What is this thing called the process industries?
To those outside the industry, the term conjures an image of an industry bristling with pipes and pumps and populated by men in hard hats who ought to be more concerned about the environment. In a seminal publication, Woodward (1965) argued that company behaviour in the manufacturing industry could be related to production process structural characteristics (batch-continuous), and Pavitt (1984) followed this line of thought, calling this cluster of industries “continuous process industries,” as did Barnett and Clark (1996). Skinner (1992) uses the term process industry in distinction from other manufacturing industries, which he calls “non-process industries,” while others call them “non-piece-goods industries.” Sometimes the process industries are denominated as “non-discrete manufacturing industries” and defined as “making materials that are measured or metered rather than being counted” (Wilson & Ali, 2014).