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The co-operative ownership of an organisation by its managers, its workers and those who use its services, this is the UK Labour Party’s latest big idea, successor to the stakeholder ethos, the third sector and last year’s flexibilism. Touted as the means whereby “progressives can recapture the ownership agenda”, mutualism promises to “embed democratic accountability” and turn staff into “champions of reform”.

The idea, and the label, are far from novel: in biology, mutualism refers to an interdependency between organisms of two different species, while in the USA of the 1920s it was the name of a radical egalitarian self-help movement. It’s not to be confused with maturialism, which the Amsterdam-based Trendwatching.com consultancy claimed would be one of 2010’s defining concepts, having identified a mature (meaning ultra-sophisticated) consumer population who respond to the risqué and exotic and inhabit the anything-goes online universe.

Send your buzzwords, jargon and new and exotic usages to tony.thorne@kcl.ac.uk

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