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This chapter reconsiders commonly held views on the ownership and management of private property, contrasting capitalist and simple property, particularly in relation to how a firm shareholder governance model has shaped society. This consideration is motivated by the scale and scope of the modern global crisis, which has combined financial, economic, social and cultural dimensions to produce world disenchantment.

By contrasting an exchange value standpoint with a use value perspective, this chapter explicates current conditions in which neither the state nor the market prevail in organising economic activity (i.e. cooperative forms of governance and community-created brand value).

This chapter offers recommendations related to formalised conditions for collective action and definitions of common guiding principles that can facilitate new expressions of the principles of coordination. Such behaviours can support the development of common resources, which then should lead to a re-appropriation of the world.

It is necessary to think of enterprises outside a company or firm context when reflecting on the end purpose and means of collective, citizen action. From a methodological standpoint, current approaches or studies that view an enterprise as an organisation, without differentiating it from a company, create a deadlock in relation to entrepreneurial collective action. The absence of a legal definition of enterprise reduces understanding and evaluations of its performance to simply the performance by a company. The implicit shift thus facilitates the assimilation of one with the other, in a funnel effect that reduces collective projects to the sole projects of capital providers.

Because forsaking society as it stands is a radical response, this historical moment makes it necessary to revisit the ideals on which modern societies build, including the philosophy of freedom for all. This utopian concept has produced an ideology that is limited by capitalist notions of private property.

This project explores tensions at the heart of the fair-trade organization Ten Thousand Villages. I investigate the ways in which this organization attempts to balance concerns of North American staff and volunteers, to care for artisans abroad, and to incorporate expansion plans in the face of challenges raised by the recession.

This chapter draws on fieldwork with stores in Toronto (2011–2012) and ongoing fieldwork (summer 2014 and 2015) with the flagship store in Ephrata, Pennsylvania.

Members express continuing tension between the organization’s founding Mennonite values and the more recent orientation chosen by leadership, to compete successfully in “regular” retail space against non-fair-trade brands. Store staff and volunteers perceive Villages’ buying practices, meant to provide “fairness” to producers in the developing world, as somewhat inconsistent with the treatment of North American store employees. Corporate leadership is mainly focused on ameliorating poverty abroad, rather than framing the organization’s work in a broader social justice context, which store staff and volunteers expect.

At a time of increasing dialogue about alternative value systems that expand notions of economic worth, the fair-trade movement offers a useful model for one attempt to work within the market system to ameliorate its damages. Understanding how one organization negotiates its own competing value systems can provide useful perspective on other revaluation projects.

Scholarship on alternative organizations and cooperatives has argued that networks and intermediaries foster organizational form stability and protect collectivist-democratic organizations from rationalization as well as decoupling. This study of field-level organizing among food co-ops in the United States shows that rather than buffering collectivist organizations from conventional market and rationalization pressures, meta-organizations can also serve as a conduit for rationalizing pressures, subjecting vulnerable organizations to what I call quasi-coercive isomorphism. Using interviews of field participants, ethnographic observations of conferences, and content analysis of organizational documents, I examine the formation and impact of National Co+op Grocers, a meta-cooperative created to leverage scale and pool resources among food co-ops. I find that this meta-organization enforced grocery industry-oriented norms of operation, management, and presentation among its member organizations in return for providing mutual liability and economies of scale. This focus on select operationally scalable processes and structures for support generated isomorphic pressures that exposed, rather than sheltered, co-ops, especially smaller, resource-poor ones, from industry standards. The meta-organization thus promoted a sectorized model of more marketized practices for the field’s cooperatives that pushed co-ops to adopt conventional grocery store practices and distanced them from the practices of other cooperative form fields. Moreover, the potential of cooperative form-specific elements for scaling was not realized: collective ownership and democratic governance remained local concerns. These findings suggest that whether meso-level cooperation among cooperatives can support alternative form maintenance is contingent on the structure and scope of the meta-organization and on the perceived scalability of operational and governance elements of the cooperative organizational form.

Indigenous entrepreneurship and hybrid venture creation represents a significant opportunity for Indigenous peoples to build vibrant Indigenous-led economies that support sustainable economic development and well-being. It is a means by which they can assert their rights to design, develop and maintain Indigenous-centric political, economic and social systems and institutions. In order to develop an integrated and comprehensive understanding of the intersection between Indigenous entrepreneurship and hybrid ventures, this chapter adopts a case study approach to examining Indigenous entrepreneurship and the underlying global trends that have influenced the design, structure and mission of Indigenous hybrid ventures. The cases present how Indigenous entrepreneurial ventures are, first and foremost, hybrid ventures that are responsive to community needs, values, cultures and traditions. They demonstrate that Indigenous entrepreneurship and hybrid ventures are more successful when the rights of Indigenous peoples are addressed and when these initiatives are led by or engage Indigenous communities. The chapter concludes with a conceptual model that can be applied to generate insights into the complex interrelationships and interdependencies that influence the formation of Indigenous hybrid ventures and value creation strategies according to three dimensions: (i) the overarching dimension of indigeneity and Indigenous rights; (ii) indigenous community orientations and (iii) indigenous hybrid venture creation considerations.

This chapter focuses on exploring social innovation among Māori entrepreneurs. The notion that social entrepreneurship (SE) has always been a core part of Indigenous entrepreneurship is supported by existing literature. However, the role of Indigenous worldviews and the entrepreneurial ecosystem within which the Indigenous entrepreneur operates has been overlooked. A Case Study method was used, Case 1 was a whānau (kinship)-based social enterprise and Case 2 was a trust-based social enterprise. Both cases showed similarities in terms of cultural integration of Māoritanga into their values and how they created social innovation. Case 1 models a social engineer by designing architectural works that integrated Māori designs, but with a contemporary style that changed how the community designed projects. Case 2 also exemplified similar characteristics, but with more focus on creating economic development through community-based enterprise with a social goal using very innovative means such as community volunteering and youth engagement. Case 3 stood for a more shared-economy approach to social innovation. The entrepreneurial ecosystem is perceived by the cases quite similarly because they felt government policies were irrelevant because they did not integrate the core values of Māori. The implications of these findings are mainly policy-based because the Crown needs to re-evaulate how it engages with Māori social entrepreneurs.

To defend the thesis that the base-superstructure hypothesis central to Marxist theory is also central paradigm of the tradition of Critical Theory. This is in opposition to those who see this hypothesis as determinist and eliminating the possibilities for the autonomy of social action. In doing so, it is able to retard and atrophy the critical capacities of subjects.

Emphasis on the return to a structural-functionalist understanding of social processes that places this version of Critical Theory against the more domesticated forms that consider “discourse ethics” and an “ethic of recognition” as the normative research program for Critical Theory. Also, an analysis of the purpose and logic of functional arguments and their relation to Marx’s concept of “determination” is undertaken.

The essence of Critical Theory hinges upon the ways that social structures are able to deform and shape structures of consciousness of modern subjects to predispose them to forms of domination and to view the prevailing hierarchical structures of extractive domination as legitimate in some basic sense.

The foundations of Critical Theory need to be rooted in a renewed understanding of the relation between social structure and forms of consciousness. This means a move beyond theories of social practices into the realm of social epistemology as well as the mechanisms of consciousness and their relation to ideology.

Few analyses of the relation between the base and the superstructure or material organization of society and the social-epistemological layer of consciousness delineate the mechanisms involved in shaping consciousness. I undertake an analysis that utilizes insights from the philosophy of mind such as the theory of intentionality as well as the sociological approach to values through Parsons.

Robert J Antonio's ‘Climate Change, the Resource Crunch, and the Global Growth Imperative’ is an excellent starting point for examining the dominance of the ideology of ‘economic growth’ within contemporary societies and social thinking against the background of the growing and profound socio-ecological crises such as climate change, resource scarcity and rampant consumerism. His article integrates contemporary scientific evidence about climate change and the ecological devastation being wrought by contemporary patterns of globalised carbon-fuelled and climate changing capitalism with classical and contemporary sociological theorising and calls for a greater engagement of social theorising with these defining challenges of the 21st century. In particular, Antonio's article begins the process of sociological theory re-engaging and re-interpreting classical sociology (Weber, Durkheim, Mead and Dewey) to develop forms of social theorising, which overcome a simplistic nature–cultural dualism and can equip critical social theory as fit for purpose for analysing the ecological, climate and resource ‘crunches’ facing all societies in the 21st century.