Dick Sblog

Martin Parker, the Professor of Organisation and Culture at Leicester Unversity’s School of Management, makes some interesting points in his piece in the Observer’s business section on November 30th.

He talks about the multiple forms of organisation that have been adopted by people throughout the time we’ve been around and comments on the fact that business schools almost universally teach market managerialism to the almost complete exclusion of every other model. Market managerialism has a tendency to promote globalising, speculative capitalism as being an inevitability.

This narrow focus means that students often get no exposure to alternatives such as local exchange trading schemes, share swaps etc. In these circumstances, is it much of a surprise that our current financial structures and corporate bodies are crashing round our ears? Monoculture may produce good crops for a while but is terribly susceptible to disease… Lets have a bit more variety.

The point was driven home to me this week. I’ve been working on a project to set up a skills academy. We proposed that the governance of this new institution should be vested in a Community Interest Company.

This form of organisation was established by Act of Parliament in 2004. It’s intended to make it easy to establish organisations that trade but have purposes that are for community benefit. CICs have an asset lock so that their value can’t be given away. (They are an alternative to jumping through hoops to have a charity with a trading arm). Despite the fact that they’ve been around for 4 years and despite the fact that social enterprise is [has been] a significant growth area in the UK, they’ve not been heard of by two of the major public bodies with which I have been dealing.