In accounting, a business or an organization and its owners are treated as two separate parties.
This helps to give a correct determination of the true financial condition of the business.
"The entity view holds the business 'enterprise to be an institution in its own right separate and distinct from the parties who furnish the funds"[1] An example is a sole trader or proprietorship.
The term has been coined by British anthropologist Mark Lindley-Highfield of Ballumbie Castle to describe ideas, such as ‘the West’, which are given agentive status as though they are homogeneous real things, where this entity-concept can have different symbolic values attributed to it to those of the individuals making up the group, who on an individual basis can be perceived differently.
Lindley-Highfield explains it thus: ‘the discourse flows at two levels: One at which ideological disembodied concepts are seen to compete and contest, that have an agency of their own and can have agency acted out against them; and another at which people are individuals and may be distinct from the concepts held about their broader society.’[2]