Abstract
While the well-known anti-globalisation motto ‘A Better World is Possible’ receives around 1,050,000,000 Google-hits, to many it remains somewhat illusive. For TINA-believers—there is no alternative—it is pure utopia. The Gibson–Graham–Cameron–Healy book delivers a comprehensive destruction of such misbeliefs by delivering the reality check on what already exists, namely, organisations that have moved beyond the domineering organisational models. While one could argue there are four forms of organisations—member-, client-, public-, and owner-beneficial—(Klikauer, 2007: 144), this book relies on three types of organisations: capitalist, alternative capitalist and non-capitalist. This three-dimensional model is carried through, structuring each of the six chapters when discussing Taking Back Economy, Work, Business, Markets, Property and Finance. The book provides an insightful discussion on how to take back the economy and ‘a manual that would help connect a broad range of economic experiments, activists, and researchers’ (p. ix).
The book’s basic premise—take back the economy—is that economies are not machines descended upon us from ‘The Wonderful World of Adam Smith’ (Heilbroner, 1972: 42–74), but the fact that ‘our economy is the outcome of the decisions we make and the actions we take [hence] people can take back the economy to make it work for societies and environments’ (p. xiii) rather than for shareholder-value and profit-maximisation. From this perspective, the book is not a pie-in-the-sky programme for revolution, nor is it a step-by-step guide to reforming what we have. It is a simple but radical set of thinking tools for people who want to start where they are to take back their economy—in countries rich or poor, in neighbourhoods or in nations, as groups or individuals. (p. xiv)
Take Back the Economy engages a radically different set of ideas compared to standard for-profit organisations. It provides us with six key principles: surviving together well and equitably; distributing surplus to enrich social and environmental health; encouraging others in ways that support their well-being as well as ours; consuming sustainably; maintaining, replenishing, and growing our natural and cultural commons; and investing our wealth in future generations so that they can live well. (p. xviii)
‘Reframing the Economy, Reframing Ourselves’ delivers convincing arguments that the mechanistic, Copernican, input–output and system-theory-based machine metaphor for the economy leads to grave misunderstandings of what the economy is, while furthering global pathologies. The book illuminates five types of well-being: material (using resources to meet our basic needs), occupational (a sense of enjoyment what we do every day), social (close personal relationships and supportive networks), community (getting engaged in community activities) and physical (good health and a safe living environment) (p. 22). Instead of human resource management’s problematic ‘balanced scorecard’, the book converts its five well-being types into a ‘well-being scorecard’ to analyse current work arrangements (p. 26). It leads, for example, to a realisation that with a national ecological carbon footprint of 4.0 (United States), 3.7 (Australia) and 2.6 (Great Britain), we cannot sustain life on earth (p. 34; http://carbonfootprintofnations.com). But the book is not primarily about current pathologies, it is about solutions.
The book provides examples of a number of businesses that operate according to the six principles and align their goals with the well-being scorecard. The ‘Argentine FaSinPat or Factory without a Boss’ (p. 51) is given as an initial example while Bayswater Basketry is analysed in great detail to explain how surplus-value is created and distributed. This in-depth case study would make an excellent resource for academics wishing to introduce their management students to alternative forms of organisations. The book also draws extensively on perhaps the world’s most famous example of non-profit-oriented forms of organising production, namely, the MONDRAGON Corporation (p. 66).
Taking back the market also means not only realising that Chiquita, Dole and Del Monte present 70% of the global banana trade (p. 101) and caring about buying fair trade products (p. 103), it means actively engaging in alternatives to markets. For example, the Hour Exchange Portland (p. 106) establishes a sort of working-time account that can be used to exchange time for other services in ‘I repair your car’ and you ‘teach my children maths’ sort of way. These are ‘other ways of transacting goods and services that build connections and meet more than our own material needs’ (p. 110). These are alternatives that are no longer simply models (cf. the 1844 established British Co-Operative Group, p. 115) like the Freecycle Group (p. 121) with 6.8 million members. But it is not just markets but also property that can be taken back. This reaches back to the famous Rousseau (1755 [1984]) quote: the first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would … have been spared …
Essentially, property is an idea attached to a thing that mutated into an ideology. But this can also be detached or taken back so that it becomes ‘a common’ as a ‘biospheric-, cultural-, social-, and knowledge common’ (p. 130). The collapse of Hardin’s common was inevitable because people under capitalism are driven to act with a narrow self-interest as Adam Smith predicted. But this hasn’t always been the case. Elinor Ostrom—the first woman awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics—has shown that ‘across the globe commons have existed for thousands of years without collapsing’ (p. 131). Perhaps unknown to the supporters of common-destroying self-interest and the property ideology is the functioning of Wikimedia Commons (p. 136) just as much as Linux, Firefox, General Public License and Copyleft (p. 144), the ‘terra communis (common land) of Outer Space’ (p. 151), and the publicly funded Human Genome Project’s open database (p. 157). And there is also the city of Grenoble in France which ‘remuniziplised’ its water and sewage treatment—a project that was followed by 40 other municipalities including Paris in 2010 (p. 152). All these are examples that provide ‘discomforting evidence’ for the frequently rehearsed ‘privatisation’ ideology.
Taking back markets and property also means taking back finance with, for example, ‘Spain’s La Gaja Laboral’ (working people’s bank) weathering the Global Financial Crisis just as much as the MONDRAGON Corporation, which is ‘currently employing nearly 85,000 people’ (p. 163). The same cannot be said for ‘government life-support [given to banks and businesses] to the tune of hundreds of billions of taxpayer’s money’ (p. 163) with, for example, a costly American International Group (AIG)-bailout, while its executives received US$165 million in bonuses when workers continue to be laid off in record numbers. Other examples of grandiose business failures are Lehman Brothers, Enron, Bernie Madoff’s US$50-billion Ponzi-scheme and so on. Unlike not-for-profit alternatives to markets and standard business organisations, these for-profit companies were all held in high esteem by business press, business schools, textbooks and academics alike. Perhaps the living proof of ‘take back finance’ is the Indian state of Kerala. This Indian state had many communist-led governments, and it has an ‘infant death rate lower than that for African-Americans in Washington’ (p. 168). In Norway, responsible investments are being made: ‘for decades now, oil and gas companies have been paying a whopping 78 percent tax’ (p. 170) to the state that invests these monies under social-environmental responsibilities. How can 78%-tax-Norway be Number 1 on the Human Development Index (HDI) (http://hdr.undp.org), while conventional business ideology claims that lower corporate tax leads to wealth and success?
When ‘investing is not an end in itself but a means to a better end’ (p. 172), calculations of social return on investment (SROI) become important (p. 173). One way of achieving this is through the Zopa-model (currently lending £205 million). This model has been copied in Germany, Spain, the United States and Canada. It creates an awareness of reporting ‘socially responsible investing trends’ currently covering US$3.07 trillion’ (p. 185). These are not pie-in-the-sky numbers. The book delineates how to grow this number without stopping at the ‘whys’ and ‘ifs’. It outlines that such a different world is already an organisational ‘actuality’, as the German philosopher Hegel would have said. Overall, the book is a most exquisitely conducted study into the not-for-profit or other side of organisations. It impressively shows that ‘another world’ is not only possible but already here. Not only those who understand what Hegel meant by ‘dialectical thinking’ need to read this book.