Prefiguring a New Economy

What researching shared ownership taught me about the economy we could build next

I recently completed a study, Employee Ownership and Financial Security in Colorado. The study examined the impacts of three different models of shared ownership on workers’ economic security. In my research, I had the opportunity to interview dozens of people who have a completely different relationship to work than most Americans. My participants share ownership of their workplace. Being an owner of a business drastically alters people’s relationship to their jobs. It allows workers to build wealth, promotes equitable financial distribution, and often enables a cultural transformation in the context of work that improves mental and physical well-being.

You can read the primary findings here and worker stories here and here.

One participant I spoke with, Stas, is a co-owner of the cooperatively run organization, SpringUp. In our conversation, I asked them a question I was struggling to answer in my research: “What role do cooperatives play in the current economy?”

As of 2025, there are an estimated 1300 worker co-ops in the United States, a small fraction of the total number of companies in the U.S. economy. Given the small number and size of worker cooperatives, they have been slow to scale. So when I posed my question to Stas, their answer helped me to see the possibilities that employee ownership, and worker cooperatives more specifically, offer us:

“What we’re doing [as a worker co-operative] is prefigurative organizing. We’re pre-embodying the kinds of structures that we believe will be more normalized in a future iteration of the economy.”

In a recent essay, The Art of Paradigm Shift, Bert Wander discusses the importance of alternatives in cultural change and calls on us, saying, “Don’t just critique the current paradigm, change it.” But if we’re going to change it, we must be able to see and name the assumptions and myths that uphold the existing paradigm—myths of meritocracy, efficiency, concentration of control, and growth—and then transcend these myths doing what Stas and their fellow owners are doing, building new ways of organizing ourselves, so that the rest of us can see what’s possible.

Our existing paradigm, and its theories, principles, and techniques, are not compatible with reality. To be more specific, our economic system is organized around constant accumulation and finding new ways to acquire wealth, requiring the extraction of profits at the cost of humans and the planet. This paradigm has become so deeply ingrained in our collective imagination that it can feel nearly impossible to envision anything outside the structures that shape today’s economy and the businesses that operate within it.

An example I think of often is when I took a graduate business course in 2023 titled, The Socially Responsible Enterprise. At the time, I was conducting a study that looked at whether or not the conditions created and rewarded by the B Corp certification created more equitable and sustainable environments for workers (TLDR: the answer is no.)

Before class one day, I was talking to the professor about my research, and the theory he laid out for me was that B Corps expand the Overton window of what business might be, existing at the edge of the range of policies or ideas considered acceptable. In other words, he viewed B Corps as a kind of pre-figuring. While I listened to him talk, I thought to myself, “Good god, I hope B Corps aren’t the most radical form of business we have.”

Having earned a certification from the non-profit B Lab for their commitment to balancing profit with social and environmental accountability, B Corps are often touted as an ethical alternative to corporations that chase only profits, but these companies still operate like standard businesses. Companies like Nespresso and Gap’s Athleta brand are B Corp certified. These are not the businesses that will transform our economy. Instead, they are tweaks to the existing paradigm. That a professor teaching a class focused on socially responsible enterprises thinks B Corps are at the edge of the Overton window tells me how much work there is to do to expand our imaginations.

The good news is that there are lots of people out there making it happen. I see it in the work that Stas and others, like the United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives, the Democracy Collaborative, the Economic Security Project, Impact Charitable, Transform Finance, and so many more, are doing. These future-makers are designing and building alternatives for us to point to, to show that another paradigm is possible. These forms dispel the myths that are propping up our current Potemkin economy.

Shared ownership models demonstrate that collective decision-making can be efficient, that wealth can be distributed more fairly, and that businesses can prioritize long-term wellbeing over short-term gains. They make visible what the dominant paradigm obscures: that cooperation, not competition, has long been a foundation of human societies. As political economist Karl Polanyi documented, most civilizations operated through reciprocity and redistribution, a lineage echoed today in worker co-ops, ESOPs, community trusts, energy and housing cooperatives, solidarity farming, and even the open-source movement.

These models don’t just offer alternatives; they expand our sense of what an economy can be. And once we can see that, the old myths start to lose their power.