The Holistic Ownership Discussion.
A current concept in academia and marketing attempts to separate the psychology of ownership from the reality of ownership
It’s my favorite time of the year, the week between Christmas and New Year. No one has to pretend to be normal this week. We all get a pass so today I am going to let the butterflies out of their pods.
A lot of good things are happening for my newsletter. I just had a phone interview with a new startup platform, Tealfeed, based in India, targeting India, Great Britton, and USA markets, perhaps more- I am working off memory at the moment as the follow-up email has not yet arrived. Tealfeed is going to feature 100 newsletters globally, and so far the platform has an economic and business focus. The program will help the newsletters to build paid subscriptions, launching in February - something to be hopeful and inspired about as we enter a new year.
A while back I published on Many Stories, but the platform had slipped out of my awareness until I got notice that a story I wrote two years ago was featured on December 23. It’s a long and rambling post featuring my vision for the Andersen Design business assets.
When Does Cultural Advance Become Cultural Decline?
Extrapolating into the Future While Walking and Ranting Through America’s Command Economy Politics
I have spent the last few days composing my third review of a paper on psychological ownership, a concept emerging from academia and applied in corporate culture. In my last review, I rejected the paper but curiosity got the better of me and so I agreed to review it once more, and this time I decided to invest more in my review.
I have not seen mention of the concept of psychological ownership in the content provider circuit or general media. I only know of the rising popularity of this conceptual packaging because I do peer reviews for Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, an academic platform. The concept of psychological ownership is being applied across industries and interacts with the ownership of internet communication platforms as well, as this story, by one of my favorite content providers, Cory Doctorow, digs deeply into the reality of ownership from the other side of the spectrum.
At first glance, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications comes across as a non-profit organization but its primary shareholders are Holtzbrinck Publishing Group and BC Partners a leading alternative investment manager focused on private equity, credit, and real estate, with deep networks across Europe and North America, which is on the back of my mind as I am reviewing a paper on psychological ownership, a subject I find only in the academic circuit written about as applied to corporate culture. It’s hard to imagine that such a subject would exist if not for large corporate culture, which is commonly an enterprise owned by shareholders, but this reviewer’s psychology of ownership is ingrained from being raised in a business in a home, a small S-corporation.
I am reviewing the paper for the third time, a paper about a theory on how to create psychological identification of ownership among the workforce, and this time around I decided to give my all, which is the end goal of the psychological ownership objective, to get the workers to give their all for the enterprise, but I do so for my own reasons.
In the first two reviews, I held back, feeling it was inappropriate to involve my own views on psychological ownership, but upon a third request, I gave myself permission to say what I really thought, within the context of the review guidelines, trying not to be unkind. I think the idea has an interesting potential that wasn’t there.
One of the paper’s themes is Taoist philosophy.
The review guidelines ask to address the sufficiency of the context. The symbolism, displayed above, frames psychological ownership within the interactive whole of ownership, inclusive of psychological ownership and material ownership, or legal ownership. Considering that the purpose of the new lingo is to encourage a feeling of psychological ownership among the workforce within an environment owned by the enterprise so that the characteristics recognized to be elevated by ownership can be realized in the service of the enterprise, the context is ownership with two subsets, psychological ownership and material ownership interacting within that context. The subsets are the stakeholders in this story, one side being a psychological stake, and the other a material stake.
Having grown up in a business in a home, my perspective is that the stakeholders are complementary, interactive, and inseparable, like the symbolism of Tao. Can the whole composed of interacting parts be separated? In quantum physics, there is something called “spooky action at a distance”. which scientists speak of as “sharing a single quantum state”. For poetry’s sake, the duality within the Tao symbol shares a single quantum state.
The strange dichotomy of ownership in large corporate cultures is that most shareholders lack psychological ownership and will leave should they think the enterprise is headed into rough times, while in the twenty-first century, the era in which the concept of psychological ownership first appeared in western academia (cf. Pierce, Kostova, & Dirks, 2001, 2003), the workforce, the target of psychological ownership is excluded from the material ownership class at work and at home.
I have used the Western version of the I Ching, or Book of Changes, translated by Richard Wilhelm, rendered into English by Cary F Baynes, with an introduction by Carl G Jung, throughout my life.
Jung’s introduction draws a distinction between Western empirical science, based on causality, and the Chinese way in which “every process is partially or totally interfered with by chance”, which western science bumped up against when discovering the quantum domain. The quantum philosophers often write about the understanding of the nature of reality revealed in the quantum domain as requiring two languages- mathematical and general, and so there is a comparison to be made between using two types of language to using two methods of knowledge and understanding, one empirical science and another based in a philosophy that incorporates quantum leaps of chance. That is a reason to theorize that a Taoist philosophy is conducive to innovation in an era when quantum computing is on the rise. I did not say that in the review, but I was thinking so, and thinking about AI, wondering if AI could be programmed to incorporate leaps of pure chance into its “thinking process”.
The paper, like most papers written about psychological ownership, is applied to the workforce in corporate culture. This is like trying to find an alchemical process to concoct the elixir of ownership from a base material reality. When considering ownership as a whole, both parts are needed to create the conditions wherein the workforce invests its creativity and innovation for the benefit of the enterprise, but ownership need not be of a business, it needs to be ownership of one’s own place in the world, which is what corporate culture used to provide when earning a living, including the ability to afford a home.
A worker is also a whole person who has a life beyond the enterprise, which is the meaning of “work-life balance” a topic as popular in the content-provider circuit, as “psychological ownership” is in the academic-corporate circuit. If the Tao symbol is representative of intermingled dualities, the whole is composed of dualities within dualities all of them entangled so that loss of home ownership accessibility affects psychological ownership sought after by the enterprise, as an action at a distance.
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……Local Leap……
In housing development, the developer cabal operating on the Boothbay Peninsula is of the ownership class. In the case of the Boothbay Region(al?) Development Corporation, It is not clear if the entity is actually the State of Maine since nothing about the identity of this corporation is transparent. Whether or not the Boothbay Region Development Corporation is one and the same as The Boothbay Regional Development Corporation, we know that there is a Boothbay Regional Development Corporation and it was formed by the State of Maine as a corporate outgrowth of itself because it is listed in the Secretary of State’s Corporate name Search as a T13 B Corporation- the title of a statute enacted the year after the Legislature declared that centrally managing the economy is an essential government function, seven years after the Home Rule Amendment was added to the Maine Constitution in 1969.
LD 2003 was enacted on April 27 2022. Things are getting even stranger as I just search for An Act To Implement the Recommendations of the Commission To Increase Housing Opportunities in Maine by Studying Zoning and Land Use Restrictions in the Maine statutes search- with and without chapter number 627, but nothing is to be found.
I also searched for the act in Title 30-A, finding no results there. However, the act can be found in a Google search for An Act To Implement the Recommendations of the Commission To Increase Housing Opportunities in Maine by Studying Zoning and Land Use Restrictions as a document, not as listed in the Maine statutes.
And I say Heyey Hey Heye Hay Hay - What’s Going On? ( click here for the great vocal!)
After thought- That might be because they amended an existing statute.
This is a task that requires going through all the amended sections, however, a quick method is just to check the revised dates on the statutes. Starting with Sec. 1. 5 MRSA §4581-A, sub-§3, ¶B,- which is not controversial, that section is last dated 2021.
I then jumped ahead to a more controversial section:
Amends the fair housing provisions of the Maine Human Rights Act to define the terms "character of a location," "overcrowding of land" and "concentration of the population" and to prohibit municipalities and government entities from using these criteria
I did not find above terms in Chapter 337: HUMAN RIGHTS ACT Subchapter 4: FAIR HOUSING, which was also last updated in 2021.
I checked §4360. Rate of growth ordinances, which does not reflect the following:
The last time §4360 was updated was 2007
And yet the BRDC, whatever it is, is already in the process of developing a 38-acre overcrowded concentrated housing zone on the Boothbay Peninsula designated for corporate-owned single-family homes, which spokesperson and unelected legislative author of LD 2003, Erin Cooperrider, says has to be corporate-owned housing because the corporation has made an investment, which is typical of the way Cooperrider justifies decisions made by whatever development corporation she is representing. Despite that reasoning, BRDC feels entitled to 40% public subsidization of their investment. Boothbay selectmen have already granted the BRCD, whatever it is, $50,000 dollars of American Rescue Plan funding and now the corporation is asking that the TIF territory be extended so the BRDC, whatever it is, can collect another $1.25 million in TIF funds.
And yet the BRDC, whatever it is, can only legally exist on its own terms, because of LD 2003, a law based on a study written in large part by BRDC’s VP and spokesperson Erin Cooperrider.
BRDC also stands for Boothbay Region Development Cabal, which existence is self-evident by the secrecy that envelops all the simultaneous development projects underway on the peninsula. The master plan of the Boothbay Regional Development Cabal speaks loud and clear, too large and overbearing to be missed. You just can’t hide it! The philosophy of ownership of Boothbay Region Development Cabal is fundamentally flawed because it exists in an ownership class world of its own completely divorced from the working classes, tone-deaf to the voices of the workforce that uses the content provider circuit as its megaphone. The BRDC, whatever it is, just can’t hear!