As the 50th anniversary of the book Small is Beautiful, 2023 is our opportunity to advance solutions to today’s social, economic, and environmental challenges that build on Schumacher’s original vision. To meet this calling, the Schumacher Center is convening a monthly series featuring New Economic thinkers, builders and activists from a range of fields. October’s theme was Rethinking Ownership & Work: Shared Responsibility & Reward.
October’s panelists are advancing forms of worker-ownership, proven models which empower employees while broadening the benefits of ownership. This online event was held on Thursday the 19th at 2PM (EST).
Featuring:
– John Abrams, Co-Founder of Abrams + Angell, President Emeritus of worker-owned South Mountain Company
– Julian McKinley, Co-Executive Director of the Democracy at Work Institute
– Beth Spong, CEO of work-owned Dean’s Beans Organic Coffee Company
Alice Maggio of The Working World, member of the Schumacher Center Board of Directors, reprised the role of host.
Each speaker was invited to reflect on the influence, if any, of Small Is Beautiful on their socio-economic thinking and activism, opening up a broader conversion on the topic, followed by audience Q&A.
Small is Beautiful concludes not on the question of scale per se, but rather on the issue of ownership. Lamenting the polarizing dichotomy of public vs private ownership in modern industrial society, Schumacher assures reader that “Reality, thank God, is more imaginative” The book’s last chapter explores alternative patterns of collective governance, ownership, and worker control as necessary for place-based, ecologically responsible, and human-scaled regeneration.
In small-scale enterprise, private ownership is natural, fruitful, and just… In large-scale enterprise, private ownership is a fiction… enabling functionless owners to live parasitically on the labor of others… an irrational element which distorts all relationships within the enterprise.
When enterprises are owned by the workers themselves, the surplus created by their industry may be more fully distributed to these individuals’ families and to the larger community that nourished and supported them. What’s more, the cooperative model carries with it the potential to transform patterns of relationships, cultivating shared accountability and cooperative deliberation. Worker-ownership of enterprise is therefore not only a means of redistributing wealth and power, but of repairing the alienation and lack of agency fostered by the old economic paradigm.
