Book Review - Beyond the Corporation: Humanity Working

by David Erdal
Published by The Bodley Head, London. 2011

Reviewed by Dick Peterson

I think a couple of quotes from the Introduction to this book will give a perspective reader a sense of what it is about. Erdal is a British author - and this is the best overall book on employee ownership worldwide I have read.

This book sets out to challenge traditional economists, whose theories have provided ideological justification for small coteries of business executives and financiers to plunder the economy even as they led it into near collapse. These same economists have predicted nothing but problems and failure for employee-owned companies. From their dominant position, with their theoretical models that justify the current ownership structure, they have for too long ignored the facts and rubbished the evidence - painstakingly gathered by diligent researchers over the course of their careers - that employee-owned companies work very well. (page x)

Humanity working in the traditional corporate and financial structures is humanity undermined and betrayed; humanity working with shared ownership becomes happier and wealthier and wiser then the defenders of the current system can imagine. (page xi)