Morgan Killick: Owners, Drivers and the FairShares Model

Morgan Killick
Morgan Killick

(First published 28/2/2013)

I’ve always been fascinated by Political Economy, to the extent that I did a Masters Degree in it at Sheffield University. I came away from that experience wanting to challenge the bi-polar conception of the economy that underpins so many of our preconceptions of how the world is run (i.e. the model that says that the State is the mechanism for delivery of public goods and the Market delivers everything else).  Yet nowhere could I find a reason why the market mechanism couldn’t be used to deliver public goods with the same benefits as the state and all the efficiency of a private company. For me, this comes down to the issue of ownership. Sure, the market fails to deliver public goods if all the organisations that operate in it are owned by investors that see profit as the only reward for risk and pursue profit-maximisation.  But there is no reason for this to have to be the case – what if some of those organisations are owned by investors pursuing other goals?

Essentially I would argue that profit is one of several https://valiumsedative.com/how-to-get-quality-prescription-diazepam-online/ rewards for risk, not the only one. Moreover in the real world, people invest for many reasons and there are many forms of investment. People may invest (whether financially or in terms of time and effort) because they want to see social value created, not pure profit. They may invest to protect their own futures and so that they can have a greater say in shaping their lives. They may invest as consumers of a service, simply to provide a form of support for the wider aims of the organisation they invest in.

Once this point is recognised, we can see that the problem of market failure lies not with the Share Capital company per se. Rather what counts is who the owners of the Share Capital company are, and indeed what drives them. Acknowledging this fact, led me to set up ESP Projects, a Social Enterprise using the share capital model but which is nevertheless owned jointly by private investors, staff and its third sector customers. FairShares is for me both an extension and a formalisation of this multi-stakeholder approach and I support it wholeheartedly!

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