After the original conceptions of socialism didn't work out particularly well, the idea of "social ownership" did tend to get a little fuzzy.

The original idea was that "property should be held in common." In other words land, for instance, should not be held privately. And -- if not all of the productive assets of society -- at least the "major means of production" should also be "held in common."

But lots of questions arose, like: "in common by what group?" . . . the nation-state or the municipality or the workers of an enteprise or the community?

Most socialists now say, "Well, it's OK for people to own their own houses if they want to. And when a house is your private property you can do with it as you please (within the strictures of zoning laws). Even small, local businesses could be owned privately. But a large productive enterprise should not be the private property of a person or a family or a clique of shareholders. Such an entity has too much social impact to be treated like a unit of private property. There should be social, rather than private, decision-making about the activities and fate of a large productive enterprise." I agree with that concept, but in practice much about socialism has turned out to be controversial, like:

* (again) what group constitutes the "social" community?

* should we be striving to have some schema of socialized economy apply universally?

* if we transition to a Green bioregional kind of society, and we figure on much more in the way of cultural diversity than exists in the modern monocultural globalized world-system, wouldn’t diversity of economic relations be the logical outcome? (in which case the conception of “social” probably would vary quite a bit)

Another idea is to gradually downscale institutions and technologies in order to minimize the number of large-scale productive enterprises.