Privatization

Privatization, also spelled privatisation (in British English), may have several meanings. Primarily, it is the process of transferring ownership of a business, enterprise, agency, public service, or public property from the public sector (a government) to the private sector, either to a business that operates for a profit or to a nonprofit organization. It may also mean the government outsourcing of services or functions to private firms, e.g. revenue collection, law enforcement, and prison management.

Privatization has also been used to describe two unrelated transactions. The first is the buying of all outstanding shares of a publicly traded company by a single entity, making the company privately owned. This is often described as private equity. The second is a demutualization of a mutual organization or cooperative to form a joint-stock company.

Forms of privatization

There are four main methods of privatization:

Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky (/ˈnoʊm ˈtʃɒmski/; born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, logician, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes described as "the father of modern linguistics," Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy, and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He has spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is Institute Professor Emeritus, and is the author of over 100 books, primarily on politics and linguistics. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.

Born to a middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish family in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. At the age of sixteen he began studies at the University of Pennsylvania, taking courses in linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy. He married fellow linguist Carol Schatz in 1949. From 1951 to 1955 he was appointed to Harvard University's Society of Fellows, where he developed the theory of transformational grammar for which he was awarded his doctorate in 1955. That year he began teaching at MIT, in 1957 emerging as a significant figure in the field of linguistics for his landmark work Syntactic Structures, which laid the basis for the scientific study of language, while from 1958 to 1959 he was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. He is credited as the creator or co-creator of the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. Chomsky also played a pivotal role in the decline of behaviorism, being particularly critical of the work of B. F. Skinner.