As we start another year, our editorial values remain the same. We’re committed to holding open a space to explore the challenges and virtues of community-driven and institutional routes to transformative change, the complex relationship between interventions at the local and national scale, and the divide between professionals and local residents in community development. We’re also dedicated to more deeply discerning the political effects of new economic approaches, to understand whether they call our current economic models into question, or merely reinforce the principles that underpin neoliberal capitalism.
Digital magazine
But we are changing in some ways. After more than a decade in print as a quarterly magazine, we’ve decided to change our primary format. From this issue – January 2025 / Issue 48 – our readers will receive each issue via our digital platform provider, Exact Editions, which can be read on your phone, tablet, or desktop, and provides easy searchable access to 500+ articles, an archive that starts with our first issue in Spring 2013.
We’ve also been aware that as a small readership publication, our content is not reaching broader audiences, or being used as much as it could in debates about the future of the national economy. So alongside the digital edition, redesigned specifically for the new format, we’re also increasing the online publication of articles, so our team and readers can share more easily with influential decision makers and new audiences.
We’re still in print…
To make the most of the print format, we are going to focus on producing a special ‘annual’ edition containing the most interesting articles, interviews, and features from across the year. Every winter, subscribers will receive our ‘annual’ publication in the post, so let us know if you need to update your mailing address (email distribution@stirtoaction.com).
A new structure
Taking advantage of this moment of change, we’ve also redesigned the structure of the magazine to reflect our current editorial priorities and to more clearly define the questions we’re asking of business, civil society, philanthropy, and culture.
- Transforming business
Growing demands for more power and accountability in the workplace have led government and the third sector to look to corporate governance to address economic and social inequalities. However, many new initiatives, from ethical certification to stewardship models, are failing to directly address questions of ownership. How can we go beyond such incremental reforms towards transforming the underlying structure of business in a way that maximises democratic power? - Revitalising civil society
Civil society is a broad term used to represent the activities of organisations outside of government, but its constitution has changed significantly in recent decades, with a large increase in charitable NGOs and memberless organisations. Connecting this trend with the broader collapse of local democratic participation and social infrastructure, it's time to revisit the importance of associational and mutual models, and their role in embedding real accountability and democratic participation in our civic and political systems.
- Democratising Wealth
Across philanthropic foundations and social movements, there has been an identity crisis around the origins, legitimacy, and legacy of historical capital, which is leading to positive efforts to ‘reimagine’ and ‘redistribute’ wealth. As this introspection continues, what is the role of democratic structures and governance, and how can such ‘redistributions’ become reliably accountable to wider constituencies outside of a small number of influential individuals and organisations? - Shifting cultural perspectives
Dominant mainstream economic structures are underpinned by prevalent cultural assumptions and mental models that can often close down alternatives and limit imagination. These cultural models have proven remarkably resilient, in part explaining the continued failure of mainstream political parties to consider the radical new approaches that are needed to address the climate crisis and widening inequalities. How do such underlying assumptions continue to reinforce themselves in the face of their material failure, and what do we need to do to replace them, as an urgent precursor to substantive political change?
As we say in our new strapline, the magazine is about ‘rebuilding democratic power across our economy and society’, and I’m personally really excited about how we – as a community – can become more prominent in current movements to redistribute wealth in philanthropy, the government’s ambition to double the size of the co-operative and mutual economy, and efforts to create a more democratic civil society in the UK.
Finally, we're in the early stages of programming a two-day ‘festival of ideas’ for London in 2025. A spin-off from our annual new economy festival – which we’ve hosted every year since 2019 – we’re taking the opportunity to diversify the programme to not only include new economics, but contemporary politics, philanthropy, psychology, nature, and other themes that inform or reflect how we design and run our economy and society. Hopefully see you later this year!
