Business Commons^™

Governing Knowledge Commons, Charlie Schweik

Sustainability Education Resources

Over the last decade or more, there has been a detectable and growing dissatisfaction among students with the "status quo" in the way the society works. Students have witnessed terrorism, long-term war, a "great recession," the "Occupy" movement, effects of climate change and worse projections to come, and most recently, a global pandemic with a great impact on the economy. Many students are looking for models of hope and alternatives to the status quo on how society at local, regional and global levels might operate to collectively address problems.

In this course, we will review historical and contemporary commons cases. …

After The Third Sector: Emerging And Disappearing Commons, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

The third sector is currently the most popular label for capturing the activities of a highly diverse set of tax-exempt corporations and nonprofit organizations. For some, the third sector is also the nonprofit organization sector, although for many of us it is also the sector of voluntary associations, clubs, self-help groups, and volunteering, although these components of voluntary action have been over-shadowed by interest in nonprofit management. The general thesis of this paper is that although the voluntary action is a more or less permanent feature of human community, the particular forms of the contemporary nonprofit organization and the third …

After The Third Sector: Emerging And Disappearing Commons, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

The third sector is currently the most popular categorical label as a summary term for capturing the activities of a highly diverse set of tax-exempt corporations and nonprofit organizations. I draw a sharper-than-usual distinction here between a third sector composed of a million or more social entrepreneurial nonprofit firms and and the voluntary associations, clubs, groups and diverse uncountable volunteer and philanthropic efforts, projects, causes, which I label as commons and which have in recent years been increasingly subsumed under the general heading of civil society. While the voluntary action of commons is a more or less permanent feature of …