Terminality in the Locus Model

Systems Economics Lexicon · Resource Loci & the Guide to Classification

Terminality is the property fixing where a chain of product usage stops, at the customer’s Central Department Cycle.

Every enterprise’s product ends up somewhere inside its customer’s operations — but “somewhere” isn’t precise enough for classification. Terminality is what makes it precise: coding a product’s path up through the customer’s system until it reaches the Central Department Cycle, the cluster of Work Group Cycles that actually performs the customer’s central activity. Getting there is what “terminal” means. The book sets seven possible objects a work group might act on — the customer’s own product, money received as compensation, a constituent or input to the customer’s product at various phases, or a subject resource — and each one comes with a determination of whether the classification stops there or has to continue.

Some cases terminate immediately: if the work group acts directly on the customer’s own product, or handles money as Phase 3 compensation, that’s the Central Department Cycle by definition. Others don’t: if the object is a Phase 2 constituent of the customer’s product, the work group is instead part of an Input Production Cycle, one level removed — non-terminal, meaning classification has to continue into a second product tier and repeat the same process until it actually reaches the Central Department Cycle. A subject resource never terminates on its own, specifically because the goal is to capture what that subject resource is actually used to do, not just where it first shows up.

The Terminal Case Marker is what records this determination for a given work group — it’s the marker, not Terminality itself, that gets written into the barcode. Terminality is the underlying property the marker is measuring.

See also: Internal Operations Loci · The Enterprise Barcode’s Nine-Marker System

Part of Resource Loci & the Guide to Classification, course 5 of 7 in the Locus Theory series. For the full term-by-term specification, see the Lexicon.