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Most people associate ownership with the ability to control something. In the USA, employee share (or stock) ownership plans (ESOPs) are one of the principal forms of employee ownership. However, most ESOPs give employees very limited rights of control over the company they own. This paper explore this conflict by examining theories of property and ownership to determine whether the right to participate in decision-making is inherent in the idea of ownership as it is generally understood. Ultimately, the author argues that the law governing ESOPs should be revised to give employees a larger role in the governance of their companies.

This paper considers the concept of ownership both historically and analytically. The author examines the roots of property theory in the work of John Locke and contemporary theorists, as well as contemporary theorizing about ownership.

There are two kinds of ownership: legal ownership and psychological ownership. In legal ownership, the right to participation is inherent but alienable, so one can legally be an owner of something but have no right of participation. Psychological ownership primarily arises from a sense of control. Legal ownership confers some part of the bundle of rights associated with property. Psychological ownership conveys a feeling of efficacy, responsibility and control, but no formal rights. The author argues that, for employee ownership to be more than mere property-holding, it must include meaningful participation in decision-making, including governance.

This paper is only concerned with ESOPs in the USA. Although the findings may be applicable, it does not address other forms of employee ownership or employee ownership outside of the USA.

People associate ownership with the ability to control something, so when workers are told they own their company but then find they have few control rights, it may undermine their sense of ownership. This then has negative implications for the company's success. To ensure meaningful levels of governance rights, policy-makers should revise the laws governing ESOPs to require greater involvement by employees.

Clarifying ambiguities around ownership will help support arguments for affording employee-owners greater control rights in their companies, which will have various spill-over effects.

Practitioners and scholars alike deploy the term, “ownership” but ascribe different meanings to it. The distinction between legal and psychological ownership is largely lacking in the ESOP literature. Clarifying this distinction will help to move the discussion forward regarding employee participation in ESOPs. In addition, the paper provides an original analysis of property that demonstrates the importance of the right to control, showing that the traditional ESOP structure may violate important aspects of that right.

According to the late Maxime Rodinson, there exists a basic affinity between the economic scheme of Islam and the capitalist system. Although most Muslims, including pro‐capitalist ones, like to think of Islam as a unique way of life and one distinguished from both capitalism and socialism, there exist various Muslims who, like Rodinson, find important similarities between Islam and capitalism. One such similarity concerns private ownership of property and the means of production. According to Zubair Hassan of India, “Islam, like capitalism, permits private ownership of property including the means of production and grants freedom of enterprise”.

This study aims to clarify the scope of the legal procedure of the acquisitive prescription in Russia.

Dialectical method, historical method and system analysis method have been used.

The authors consistently prove the inadmissibility of applying acquisitive prescription to land plots in private, state or municipal ownership. One of the features of Russia as an emerging market economy is that, the major part of state lands is in so-called “non-delineated state ownership.” Plots included in such lands are not registered in the cadaster or transferred to particular public owners. That is why, the authors prove that the procedure of acquisitive prescription must be applied only in relation to land plots that are in non-delineated state ownership and have been occupied by citizens and legal entities for 15 years.

The authors propose new guarantees of the rights of private and public land owners. Clarification of the scope of the acquisitive prescription procedure will streamline the turnover of real estate in Russia.

To examine how the allocation of property rights in multiple‐ownership buildings in Hong Kong creates an environment in which the optimization of asset value may be difficult to achieve and in this situation how owners chose to overcome the associated problems of collective action decision making to resolve issues of building management.

An institutional approach, drawn from the literature on common property and collective action, is used to examine the management of multiple‐ownership property. The paper uses a hedonic pricing model to empirically test whether, in such circumstances, management is reflected in property price and which mode of governance owners prefer as a mechanism for resolving problems of collective action.

The institutional arrangements for co‐ownership and use of multiple‐ownership property assets in Hong Kong have resulted in an “anticommons” environment, in which individual owners are in a position to veto action in relation to the property. In the absence of mandatory management the study indicates property prices are increased in those cases where owners have chosen to resolve the difficulties of collective decision making by forming incorporate owners' groups and employing professional management services.

The outcome of the empirical work is the result of an initial study carried out in one district in Hong Kong and may not be generalised. In the future, the approach will be extended to other areas.

In the absence of a regulatory environment which ensures the management of multiple‐ownership property assets, owners may be better advised to formalise arrangements through the formation of incorporate owners' groups and appointment of professional property management agents.

The paper assesses the implications of an anticommons environment for the management of multiple‐ownership property in Hong Kong. Examines arrangements for collective decision making and demonstrates influence of management on property price.

The field of broad-based employee ownership within corporations is a specific application of the foundational topic of property ownership. It is situated at the intersection of a broad range of scholarly disciplines including economics, law, finance and management. Each discipline contributes vocabulary and distinctions describing this field. That broad spectrum of disciplinary inquiry is a strength but it also lends a “ships passing in the night” quality to discussions of employee ownership. This paper attempts to unravel the narrative diversity surrounding this topic. Four meanings of ownership are introduced. Those meanings are in turn embedded within two abstract models of the corporation; the corporation as property and the corporation as social institution.

There is no experimental design The paper presents a conceptual overview and introduces a taxonomy of four meanings and two models of ownership.

Four meanings of ownership are introduced. The meanings are ownership as compensation, investment, retirement and membership. Those meanings are in turn embedded within two abstract models of the corporation; the corporation as property and the corporation as social institution.

No hypotheses are advanced. This is not a research paper. A conceptual overview that makes use of taxonomy of meanings and models is introduced to help clarify confusions abundant in the field of employee ownership. Readers may differ with the categories of meanings and models introduced in this conceptual overview.

The ambition of the paper is to describe the various meanings and models of employee ownership presently in use in both academic and applied settings. It is not necessary or desirable to assert the primacy of a single meaning or model in order to achieve progress. The analysis provided here surfaces a range of assumptions about ownership that have heretofore been implicit in both scholarship and in practice. Making those assumptions explicit should prove useful to both scholars and practitioners of employee ownership.

The concept of employee ownership enjoys a relatively broad appeal with the public. Among the academic disciplines that have trained their lights upon it, a more mixed reception prevails. Much of the academic and policy controversy derives from confusion about the nature and structure of employee ownership. This paper attempts to address that confusion by presenting a taxonomy of meanings and models that may prove useful for future research.

This study is one of the first efforts to comprehinsively map the various meanings and models of broad-based employee ownership.

This paper aims to investigate the potential of the “image-idea” of a “circular economy” for re-thinking property in law: In particular, to develop a strategy for making visible “alternative property practices” of community ownership across the subject areas of business and property law, to enhance the visibility of models of community ownership and interrogate their potential.

Case study research was undertaken into three public houses to investigate the ways in which the orthodoxies of property and ownership in the academy are challenged by evidence of “alternative property practices” in the community.

Using this approach renders visible tensions between the logics of economic value and social asset, carried in processes of abstraction and materiality, and mediated within the field of property by the development of techniques for holding property as title and benefit. It reveals the ways in which “property” as idea, practice and technique is used by people seeking to disrupt or defend against the economic logic of profit and investment. It raises questions concerning how property and law is imaged in the academy and it introduces one way of using an image-idea to open new perspectives and potential.

These implications emerge: the partiality of orthodox accounts of property; the importance of thinking property in terms of life-cycle and logics ecologies, field and techniques; how an model-theory derived from one discipline can be repurposed, in a second life, in an other discipline as an “image-idea” to refresh the host discipline; the significance of investigating “community assets” within and for property law and the need for more research into “alternative property practices” and the importance of case studies.

An enhanced knowledge of the development and potential of “community assets” within the academy, and of the potential to promote and support “alternative property practices” with the requisite legal skills and techniques – alongside a consideration of the limits of formal law in terms of policy expectations.

The research is of value to community activists in thinking how law can be used to support community development in terms of holding community assets; and the limitations of formal law which then requires an embedded approach considering how the development of practices and narratives can support community initiatives in relation to property held for community benefit.

There has been very little coverage of “community assets” within legal research, especially moving across business and property as subject areas, and no coverage on public houses taken into community ownership. This paper combines an introduction to the relevant legal forms with a consideration of the use of them in practice: considering, in particular, how practices and narratives deployed by and within the community think and present “property” as a means by which to counter the economic logic of profit. All this is made possible through the use of case-studies made visible by the utilization of the image-idea of the circular economy – used here not as a model-theory, but rather as an aid to opening thinking into new territories accessed through new perspectives.

The purpose of this second part of this special issue is to contribute to a better understanding of the nature of Soviet society. It is not possible to analyse such a society in all its complexities within the space of one study. There are, however, some economic relations which determine society's major features. We believe that commodity‐production relations in the Soviet Union are of this type.

The development of standardized fixed-income securities and organized secondary markets in which to price and trade the securities is a widely recognized factor in the emergence of modern developed economies. However, the ongoing global financial crisis has exposed the existence of a fundamental and costly conflict between lender and borrower property rights when debt is securitized that has imperiled some fixed-income markets in their present form. This paper aims to suggest a new non-debt concept for fixed-income finance that avoids the conflict inherent in securitized debt.

The paper considers how to build the foundation of non-debt fixed-income technology on property law instead of contract law.

Fixed-income products based on the new technology expose investors to lower loss risk than investors incur with analogous debt-based products. Such products could lower the cost of fixed-income finance and contribute to the global restoration of fixed-income market liquidity.

Variations in property law across venues imply that the new financial technology is not implementable in all legal systems.

The new financial technology could represent an opportunity for the Islamic financial industry to expand its fixed-income horizons in the global financial markets. The upside both within and beyond the Islamic community could be dramatic.

In common with many other cities in the world, Hong Kong has a large number of older and less well‐maintained buildings which, for predominantly economic reasons, are still highly utilised by a variety of mixed and non‐compatible uses. In these circumstances, a comprehensive approach to ensuring high standards of property management is essential, but recently a series of disastrous fires have highlighted some of the difficulties of managing property in this environment. The Government’s response to fire disasters has been to enact additional fire safety legislation. While the promotion of a safer environment in older buildings is to be applauded, it is arguable that such an approach merely addresses the symptoms ‐ the fires ‐ and not the underlying cause ‐ the management of such buildings. An examination of property management practice in Hong Kong indicates there are two important systemic factors which influence the standards and quality of services provided. The first is the way in which the property management industry is currently structured, the barriers to entry and the lack of regulation of property managers. The second is the way in which the responsibilities and relationships between owners and property managers are dictated by the method of ownership in multi‐ownership property. It is the impact that this method of ownership has on the twin issues of safety and property management which is examined in this paper.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of conversion to REIT status by former listed property companies in the United Kingdom on the level of institutional ownership during the period of 2007–2016.

This paper uses an event study framework to track the change in institutional ownership three years before and after a REIT conversion event. This event study approach circumvents the sample selection bias issue associated with the conversion event wherein the decision to convert to REIT is likely to be endogenous.

Panel regression analysis reveals that changing to REIT status led to a 12.8 and 15.2% increase in institutional ownership and number of institutional investors, respectively. The first order of priority in institutional investors' investment in REIT shares is their preference for liquidity. Further analysis shows that institutional investors changed their preferences towards characteristics associated with systematic risk, firm age and liquidity after the conversion event by becoming less averse to firm-specific risk, placing more emphasis on firm age and less emphasis on systematic risk and liquidity.

Overall, conversion to REIT status helps increase former property companies' investor base, which is in line with the regulator's aim to open up the property market to a wide range of investors through the introduction of a REIT regime. Findings from this paper also have policy implications for countries that are considering a REIT regime for their capital market and existing REIT regimes without a formal conversion mechanism.

This paper offers, for the first time, evidence on 1) how conversion to REITs influences firms' institutional ownership and 2) the determinants of converted REITs' institutional ownership.