A blueprint for creating sustainable businesses, emphasizing the power and potential of cooperative models
“[An] important take on achieving a cleaner and safer world. . . . [Scanlan] envisions a future where green policies go hand-in-hand with worker empowerment, and provides a detailed blueprint for how to get there. . . . Her book offers essential hope that we can yet save ourselves . . . from ourselves.”—Bill Lueders, The Progressive, “Favorite Books of 2021”
Drawing on both her extensive experience founding and directing social enterprises and her interviews with sustainability leaders, Melissa Scanlan provides a legal blueprint for creating alternate corporate business models that mitigate climate change, pay living wages, and act as responsible community members, including Certified B Corps and benefit corporations. With an emphasis on cooperatives, this book reveals the power and potential of cooperating as a unifying concept around which to design social enterprise achieving triple bottom-line results: for society, the environment, and finance.
Melissa K. Scanlan is the Lynde B. Uihlein Endowed Chair and Professor in Water Policy and Director of the Center for Water Policy at the School of Freshwater Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
“If we are going to transform our energy systems at the pace physics requires, nothing could be more important than replacing turbo-charged hyper-individualistic capitalism with some of the cooperative schemes explored in this revealing book."—Bill McKibben, author Deep Economy
“Melissa Scanlan's pioneering book begins with a powerful vision and then shows us how to achieve it, highlighting the cooperative and other alternative business forms as we navigate big transitions ahead.”—Gus Speth, co-editor of The New Systems Reader and author of Red Sky at Morning
“Combining a critique of current business law with her deep understanding of environmental law, Melissa Scanlan successfully argues that cooperative business structures can and should be looked to as a route for social entrepreneurs.”—Dana Brakman Reiser, Brooklyn Law School
“Melissa Scanlan powerfully demonstrates that new principles are needed—and are eminently practical and possible—to move beyond the ecologically destructive and inequality generating economic structures of our challenged era.”—Gar Alperovitz, author What Then Must We Do? and CoFounder, The Democracy Collaborative
“At a time when calls for a democratic, sustainable, and equitable economy grow ever louder, this book challenges corporations to shift away from maximizing profits for shareholders, and provides best practices and proposals to promote this change.”—Alexandre Peñalver i Cabré, University of Barcelona
Related Books
Sign up to the Yale newsletter for book news, offers, free extracts and more
This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.