In my previous post, I explained why we need to change incentive structures if we want to build companies that are a force for good in…
Steward-ownership
Steward-ownership structures a company's ownership in a way that separates economic rights (related to money) from voting rights (related to decision-making power).[1] Steward-ownership is considered an alternative to shareholder primacy models.[2] Steward-ownership can be implemented using different legal forms depending on the type of company and jurisdiction.[3]
Steward Ownership, Sustainability, and Capitalism: Part 1
What's steward ownership? - Purpose
Steward ownership is a proven ownership model that has been in place for many decades – having been implemented by companies like Zeiss (Germany), Novo Nordisk (Denmark), Patagonia (USA), Bosch (Germany), Signal (USA), BuurtzorgT (Netherlands), Carlsberg (Denmark) and many others around the world.
What's steward ownership? - Purpose
Steward ownership is a proven ownership model that has been in place for many decades – having been implemented by companies like Zeiss (Germany), Novo Nordisk (Denmark), Patagonia (USA), Bosch (Germany), Signal (USA), BuurtzorgT (Netherlands), Carlsberg (Denmark) and many others around the world.
Company as a Commons
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.
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…
Denizen
What is stakeholder capitalism? What is required to truly instantiate stakeholder decision making in the governance of companies?
Built, Owned & Stewarded in Europe
Steward & Employee Ownership keep mission, capital and talent rooted in Europe. We're asking the EU to make it an option.
Alkemio
Alkemio, a purpose-driven organization based in the Netherlands, found a way to reward both financial backers and employees contributing their time within a steward-ownership framework. The founders aimed to create a structure that would:
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.
We Found The Radical Solution That Could End Corporate Monopolies
Democratizing AI Companies — The Collective Intelligence Project
As AI reshapes society, the companies behind these technologies face a critical challenge: how to build corporate governance structures that prioritize public benefit over profit maximization;.
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.
“What we’ve got to understand is that this epistemic chaos, this collective psychosis, has risen as a result of the shareholder-driven model of global capitalism. What we’ve got to do is look at the mechanisms of that wealth pump itself & start to change that.” theecologist.org/2026/sep/09/soft-body-turtle
The soft body of the turtle
theecologist.org