It's hard to find a good write-up of the different legal forms an organisation can take in the UK. Partly this is because there's little demand: if you're trying to set up a non-profit organisation, you just don't care about the differt types of share capital arrangements companies might adopt, and vice-versa.

There's another problem: agenda-pushing. Some people have got their favourite legal form, e.g., the cooperative, or the CIO, or the limited liability partnership, and want to see the rest of the ecosystem through that lens. There is a slight tendency on the part of government to push CIOs and CIC status, for example. So get weird propaganda on gov.uk sites saying "Oh, we couldn't have done all this with a limited company", when in fact the speaker was indeed using a limited company, because they're trying to push CIC status.

A more benign form of the above is where people are trying to answer a different question, the question what business structures exist for your new venture. This leads to a bit of conflation and duplication, as "sole proprietorship" and "trading as" might make an appearance, giving us our third problem. What's going on is they're giving guidance on business structures, not legal forms.

Example: UK government guide to business structures

Good effort by NCVO

The third problem is making the list orthogonal from other concerns. By necessity, an organisation is of one and only type. The types are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive: you can't be a company AND unincorporated at the same time, both as a matter of logic and as a matter of law. But: there are certain statuses that a legal entity can have, and some of these statuses are available to multiple types of legal entity. Several different types can be charities. Several different descriptions of company may acquire the status of "Community Interest Company" and so on. So I'd like to be able to split that off too. Another thing which might get conflated is the different ownership and governance models that might exist within one of these types.

Agendas, attitudes, assumptions and trends in the UK organisational space

Legal forms vs statuses

An organisation has one and only one legal form, such as being a company or a Charitable Incorporated Organisation ("CIO"). All of these forms are mutually exclusive: an entity cannot be both a company and a CIO at the same time. There are other important characteristics of organisations, such as charitable status, which interact with legal form: some legal forms are inherently charitable (e.g., CIO), others are inherently non-charitable (e.g., limited liability partnerships), whereas in other cases it depends on the particular organisation's constitution.

It is therefore useful to be able to separate out the concerns: the legal form on the one hand, and other statuses and properties that organisations may have on the other.

Other notes / links

History of UK corporations

A blog post about one-member-one-vote in companies and societies

Organisational form fetishism

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