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21 - Who Should Own a Business?

from Part III - Our Work

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2022

Daniel Scott Souleles
Affiliation:
Copenhagen Business School
Johan Gersel
Affiliation:
Copenhagen Business School
Morten Sørensen Thaning
Affiliation:
Copenhagen Business School
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Summary

It’s easy to assume that all businesses (of any scale at least) are corporations, and that all corporations are run the same. They have executive leadership, boards of directors, and their overriding aim is to make profit for their investors. This is how most large corporations are organized and operate; and you could be forgiven for assuming that this is just the way things work. That said, close readers of this volume have likely intuited that this way of running a business is in fact historically specific, and owes a lot to neoliberal ideas about how a business and how society should work (hierarchically, with a minimum of democracy, and all organized to generate profits and reward shareholder owners). Here, Wood and Palladino take these assumptions apart by illustrating all the different way that other people (even workers!) can in fact own and control companies. One simple thing this chapter shows is that in designing a business or organizing a company, it doesn’t need to be top-down and oriented toward maximizing shareholder value; but can be oriented toward other values, and these values can be reflected in its organization.

Type
Chapter
Information
People before Markets
An Alternative Casebook
, pp. 446 - 462
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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References

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