ESENER-PSR 2009 - European Agency for Safety and Health at Work

1.2 The unit of enquiry: Company vs. establishment
1.2.1 Definitions
Having a well defined unit of enquiry for data-collection is an indispensable prerequisite for
any survey – be it on the national or the multi-national level. For the ESENER, therefore a
common definition of the unit of enquiry had to be used which is equally applicable to all 31
countries involved in the study. For surveys among organisations, the unit of enquiry can
generally be either the “establishment” or the “company”.
The distinction between “company” and “establishment” is not an easy one. Therefore, a
common base of understanding should be established with regard to the quite disturbing
variety of different terms – such as enterprise, company, firm, establishment, workplace, local
unit etc. - which are in use for the denomination of the unit of enquiry.
A company is defined as a legal unit where commercial activities of any kind (production,
sales, services etc.) are being practiced.
The terms enterprise and firm are often used synonymously with “company”. Yet, some
authors state that an enterprise comprises only “larger” companies which have more than one
employing unit under common ownership or control (Groß 2003: 10). According to this
narrower definition, an enterprise would always be a multi-site company. But as this distinction
is obviously not common place, both terms are used synonymously in this report.
An establishment can be defined as “…the local unit or the reporting unit where work takes
place” (Groß 2003: 10). In companies which consist of one local unit only (single-site
companies), there is no factual difference between the terms company and establishment:
each single-site company is at the same time an establishment. Yet, the distinction between
company and establishment is significant for so called multi-site companies, i.e. companies
whose activities are not bound to a single site or geographical location but take place in
several sites/locations. In such companies, each site of activity which is not legally
independent is counted as an establishment. Examples are banks with their various branch
offices, chains of supermarkets, car factories with different production sites etc. Unfortunately
there are a couple of cases where this distinction is not easy. E.g. in some cases there are
units which are organizationally closely connected with others and which may even share an
in large parts common firm name, but are nevertheless formally legally independent. Strictly
speaking, such units are not to be regarded as establishments of multi-sites, but as companies
of their own.
The terms workplace and especially local unit are often used synonymously with
establishment. But while the usage of local unit as synonym for establishment is widely
acknowledged (e.g. several National Statistical Offices use this term for their establishment
statistics), in some publications workplace is referring to sub-units within establishments,
therefore we avoid the usage of this term here in this report.
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