Ultimately, what we need for Citizen business to take full hold is for the cooperative model to expand massively, and for the businesses in it to step into the Citizen Story.

go so far as to say the whole organisation needs a Citizen rebrand: what we need in today’s world is less the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and more the MBC, the Movement for British Culture.

‘There’s a crack, a crack in everything,’ sang Leonard Cohen. ‘That’s where the light gets in.’ The Consumer Story has cracked, and is collapsing. That’s a good thing. Now we need to get to work, showing up as Citizens in the places where we live and, crucially, in our places of work.

acknowledging the Citizen in ourselves is often easier said than done. It bucks the prevailing wisdom that would have us believe that humans are lazy, greedy, self-centred, and apathetic; that we can’t be trusted to do anything but mess things up further. It risks being judged naïve or unrealistic. And once embraced, the Citizen also mandates that

After all, it has been the dominant story for only 80 years or so; its very dominance is evidence that stories can and do change.

How might you ask for your customers’ experience and ideas, not just their money?

growing and supporting fellow citizens in Africa so they can create their own solutions, and overturn the colonial legacy of international aid and foreign philanthropy.

Those who want to get more involved can join the Beatnik Brewing Collective, a subset cooperative which develops new recipes for the wider company. This relationship with its customers has led Brewdog to some important decisions: Watt and Dickie openly credit the influence of the Equity Punks on the decisions to become a living wage employer, to

At their best, unions have through history provided a vital check and balance, representing the collective interests of workers and producers, ‘the people,’ in constructive tension with business owners. The Consumer Story moved the focal point. Now ‘the people’ were the Consumers, not the producers or workers, and business owners and the state took