What if excess wealth derived from business couldn't be privatized? Through the levers of steward-ownership, companies can protect their purpose-oriented long term mission from the maligned incentives of absentee stakeholders.
Democratic Ownership Funds: Creating Shared Wealth and Power
Recent decades have seen a rapid and little-discussed transformation in corporate ownership structure, with vital consequences for company behaviour and inequality.
WSJ News Exclusive | Private-Equity Giants Back New Nonprofit Promoting Employee Ownership
More than 60 groups, including banks and pension funds, have also signed on to support Ownership Works, which aims to promote broad-based stock ownership as a means of curbing income inequality.
Unlocking the commons
"The most powerful and interesting media model will remain raising money from members who don't just permit but <em>insist</em> that the product be given away for free."
Think Like a Commoner | A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons
In our age of predatory markets and make-believe democracy, our troubled political institutions have lost sight of real people and practical realities. But if you look to the edges, ordinary people are reinventing governance and provisioning on their own terms. The commons is arising as a serious, practical alternative to the corrupt Market/State.
The corporation—a return to origins?
This paper contributes to contemporary debates in political theory about the power of business corporations by offering a genealogy of the corporation through the lens of a series of historical mutations of the corporate form. Originally, there were two corporate forms, both non-profit: member corporations (today's associations) and property corporations (today's charitable foundations). The contemporary business corporation arguably is a hybrid of both of these original forms, introducing unique commercial features (shares with profit distribution rights that are transferable). These commercial features are largely responsible for the corporation's extractive nature, that is, its tendency to prey on non-shareholder interests. The future of the corporation may well lie in a partial return to the two original non-profit forms. Two corporate forms developed in the nineteenth century can provide the format for such a return: cooperatives (which reinforce the idea of membership) and foundation-owned companies. The cooperative structure is a halfway house between a business corporation and a member corporation (association), and in a parallel fashion, a foundation-owned company is a halfway house between a business corporation and a property corporation (foundation). If we want to reduce corporations’ extractive nature, facilitating the spread of cooperatives and foundation-owned companies seems the way forward.
Shareholder Democracy Is a Corporate Governance Myth That Won’t Die
In a new article, we challenge one of corporate law’s most persistent narratives: the concept of “shareholder democracy.” With people on opposing sides of recent high-profile battles at compa…
Work, Justice, and Collective Capital Institutions: Revisiting Rudolf Meidner and the Case for <span style="font-variant:small-caps;">Wage‐Earner</span> Funds
ABSTRACT This article makes the case for a specific variety of what we call Collective Capital Institutions (CCIs), by returning to the idea of Wage‐Earner Funds (WEFs) – a 1970s Swedish policy proposal designed gradually to shift ownership and control over parts of the economy to democratically controlled institutions. We identify two attractive rationales in favour of such a scheme and argue that both can fruitfully be transposed to the current worldwide economic situation. The egalitarian rationale is that WEFs could help in the pursuit of equality by giving a wider set of people a stake in collectively owned companies and a right to their profits. The democratic rationale is that WEFs redistribute not only these profits, but also the power over economic decisions made within companies. We then contrast such schemes for collective capital ownership with the similar but much more privatised proposals set out in, for instance, John Rawls's idea of a ‘property‐owning democracy’. We argue that CCIs ultimately are more likely to contribute to the development of the ‘sense of justice’ within society that is needed for a stable just society. We conclude that CCIs deserve a great deal more exploration in academic and political discussions of egalitarian economic systems.
Funding the Commons | Public Goods Funding
We convene researchers, builders, and institutions to develop the funding mechanisms, governance systems, and coordination tools that public goods need in an age of AI.
The Corporation’s Neoliberal Soul? | Human Rights after Corporate Personhood
Human Rights after Corporate Personhood offers a rich overview of current debates, and seeks to transcend the "outrage response" often found in public discourse and corporate legal theory. Through ...
Investing in Enterprises That Work for Everyone (SSIR)
Impact investors can support a more just economy by prioritizing alternative ownership enterprises that shift power away from shareholders to workers, the community, and the planet. <meta property=
The tragedy of the commons is a false and dangerous myth | Aeon Essays
Far from being profoundly destructive, we humans have deep capacities for sharing resources with generosity and foresight
Commons
The commons are the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth. These resources are held in common even when owned privately or publicly. Commons can also be understood as natural resources that groups of people manage for individual and collective benefit. Characteristically, this involves a variety of informal norms and values employed for a governance mechanism. Commons can also be defined as a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates.
Managing and resisting ‘degeneration’ in employee-owned businesses: A comparative study of two large retailers in Spain and the United Kingdom
Employee-owned businesses have recently enjoyed a resurgence of interest as possible ‘alternatives’ to the somewhat tarnished image of conventional investor-owned capitalist firms. Within the context of global economic crisis, such alternatives seem newly attractive. This is somewhat ironic because, for more than a century, academic literature on employee-owned businesses has been dominated by the ‘degeneration thesis’. This suggested that these businesses tend towards failure—they either fail commercially, or they relinquish their democratic characters. Bucking this trend and offering a beacon—especially in the United Kingdom —has been the commercially successful, co-owned enterprise of the John Lewis Partnership whose virtues have seemingly been rewarded with favourable and sustainable outcomes. This article makes comparisons between John Lewis Partnership and its Spanish equivalent Eroski—the supermarket group which is part of the Mondragon cooperatives. The contribution of this article is to examine in a comparative way how the managers in John Lewis Partnership and Eroski have constructed and accomplished their alternative scenarios. Using longitudinal data and detailed interviews with senior managers in both enterprises, it explores the ways in which two large, employee-owned, enterprises reconcile apparently conflicting principles and objectives. The article thus puts some new flesh on the ‘regeneration thesis’.
Denizen
What is stakeholder capitalism? What is required to truly instantiate stakeholder decision making in the governance of companies?
Private Equity Is Starting to Share With Workers, Without Taking a Financial Hit (Published 2024)
The buyout giant KKR pioneered a model of granting ownership stakes to employees at portfolio companies. Now it wants the approach to spread.
