Communities of ownership

I do a tremendous amount of non-fiction reading in culture, economics, politics, finance, anthropology, and history.  It's been rare, lately, after the life exposure and reading that I've done, to run across books with more than a few novel ideas, if that.  I've been delighted to have come across Barry C. Carter's Infinite Wealth: A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era,  a truly gratifying read full of profound perspectives that I highly recommend.  Here's a taste:

"I define mass privatization as a wealth-creation organization or community in which individual workers, or a small team of workers, own the specific work they perform.  These private owners work in partnership with other private owners.  Networks of small virtual teams (teamnets) form chains of customers linked through information technology to form powerful global enterprises (Lipnack and Stamps 1993).  Teamnets are flexible enough to customize at the individual level while producing en masse, hence mass customization.  Partners are bound together through a compelling vision and mission and through the alignment that comes from an organizational structure based upon win/win compensation.  Internal to the organization, suppliers as partners are compensated directly by their customers.  Likewise, internal customers pay their suppliers directly.  There are no managers, salaries, bosses, hierarchies, employees, or central controls.

       Is mass privatization socialism?  No!  In socialism the individual worker owns nothing.  Is is capitalism?  No!  In capitalism the individual worker does not own the individual work performed.  Though socialism purports to be a system in which workers own the means of production, and capitalism espouses the right of the individual to own and entire business, neither system supports the individual's owning the means of production for his or her own work.  Both systems are, however, based on the central control and ownership of work.

        Mass privatization is a more coherent wealth-creation paradigm than either socialism or capitalism; it comes from a higher vantage point.  It synthesizes the best values of both systems (individual liberty and worker ownership) and ignores the negative methods (authoritarian control and the centralization of ownership)Mass privatization is a wealth-creation organizing structure that both socialist and capitalist would likely embrace.  They would both feel as if their views had been proved correct and valid.  Ironically, there is also the possibility that either of these people would find mass privatization total heresy." Barry C. Carter Infinite Wealth

Just found a great link to a number of Barry C. Carter's writings here:  http://futurepositive.synearth.net/2002/07/16/

Here's an interesting example of an approach moving toward this sort of solution.