Marjorie Kelly — Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution (2012)
Kelly investigates a global landscape of ownership models that operate outside extractive capitalist logic — employee-owned firms, community land trusts, foundation-owned companies, cooperative enterprises — and extracts from them five structural patterns of “generative design”: Living Purpose (creating conditions for life), Rooted Membership (ownership in living hands), Mission-Controlled Governance (humans at the helm), Stakeholder Finance (capital as friend), and Ethical Networks (reinforcing shared values).
The core distinction is between extractive ownership (designed to maximize financial extraction for absentee shareholders) and generative ownership (designed to sustain the conditions for life across generations). Kelly argues that ownership design is the fundamental infrastructure of economic life — more determinative than incentives, regulations, or cultural values — and that changing ownership structures changes what kinds of economic behavior are possible.
For OM: Kelly provides the economic theory underpinning OM’s claim that DAOs, commons governance, and cosmo-local production represent genuine alternatives to extractive capitalism — not just culturally but structurally. The generative ownership patterns map closely onto extitutional design principles.