Читать книгу Creating Risk Capital - Ian Whalley - Страница 37

While dominant, investor ownership is far from universal, even for large-scale enterprise. The Yale Law School Professor Henry Hansmann demonstrated this as long ago as 1996 in his comprehensive account of various other forms of ownership adopted in major countries. ^[4] He examined a wide range of enterprises including employee-owned firms, co-operatives and mutual firms, clubs and non-profit enterprises. He found that Europe has many such firms, some of them large like Britain’s John Lewis Partnership, Spain’s Mondragon, ^[5] and the major farming co-operatives in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden. ^[6]

In the USA, “the world’s great exemplar of corporate capitalism”, ^[7] and a country which is hardly viewed as a particularly collectivist society, ^[8] Hansmann found that other ownership forms play a major role in mainstream industries. Co-operatives flourish and employee ownership is common in service sector firms in medicine and among lawyers, consultants, investment bankers and the like. These are “prosperous professionals largely in the service of corporate capital”. ^[9] There are, moreover, organisations like mutual insurance companies and farmer-owned producer co-operatives, some of which are very large indeed.