The slogan is inscribed on wooden boards in the restaurant and the shop and every package dispatched from the premises: "Loch Fyne Oysters, a company owned and run by its employees."

The slogan is inscribed on wooden boards in the restaurant and the shop and every package dispatched from the premises: "Loch Fyne Oysters, a company owned and run by its employees."

It's been that way for five years, since the death of co-founder Johnny Noble and the acquisition of the business by the 100 plus women and men who prepare, package and dispatch the food, sell it over the counter, or serve it in the restaurant in the simply-furnished, converted farm buildings at the head of Loch Fyne in Argyll.

As a new book from David Erdal, written to celebrate the fifth anniversary, recounts, it was a close-run thing. The news that the business was to be sold attracted the usual parade of men in suits, some representing a fish-processing firm in England. Instead, a trust representing all the staff and financed by the Royal Bank and the Baxi Partnership made a successful bid.

In many ways the Loch Fyne buyout represents the polar opposite of the fast-buck, quick get-out model of private equity buccaneers, the scale of whose avarice is matched only by the mountain of misery they leave in their wake.

For some "masters of the universe", an acquisition is not an investment in a successful business to help it prosper further, but a market place punt where the in-house team typically will be dumped in favour of managers whose time-served skills are in stripping out assets. The Loch Fyne story offers a different kind of vision of a well-managed company whose future performance lies, quite literally, in the hands of the people who work there.

Half of the shares are held by the trust, the other 50% are available for employees to buy. But, if they sell, they sell back into the company. The original deal reflects that founding ethos, with the first batch of shares distributed among employees not by dint of previous salary levels, but on length of service to reflect the time spent helping to build the business.

Erdal has form here. He led an employee buy-out at his family firm, Tullis Russell. And he chaired the Baxi Partnership at the time of the Loch Fyne purchase, itself a fund specifically set up to facilitate employee ownership. He's evangelical about the benefits which he describes as "a quiet revolution, not one that concentrates power and wealth into the hands of the greedy, but one that redesigns the company to distribute understanding and wealth widely".

Well-motivated employees with a legal stake in the future of their company are also likely to be more productive, he argues, citing long-standing employee partnerships such as John Lewis, and listing corpses left in the wake of hostile acquisitions. Even apparently benign deals have a habit of short-changing the staff who are also "taken over".

When Long Fyne Oysters diversified into satellite restaurants, the new company was set up by the two men who first established the business, Johnny Noble and Andy Lane, and the restaurants run by long-standing members of the core staff.

Then, 10 years ago, a private equity company took the major shareholding in a much-lauded city deal. But, claims Erdal, the company swiftly cut the wages of the waiting staff to beneath minimum-wage levels, topping pay packets up from the service charge to large dining parties.

It would be idle to pretend that employee ownership is an easy option. People unused to having their personal judgment queried have to cope with the consensual mode essential to good teamwork.

Boards have to get their heads round elected employee directors sitting round the same table. People used to just clocking in and out have to accept responsibilities as well as shares.

There is no immunity from market fluctuation, as a company highly dependent on salmon prices knows only too well. And there is a price to pay for being committed to sustainability, which means, in the case of Loch Fyne Oysters, not using wild fish while stocks are threatened, and only using the farmed variety where the conditions neither encourage parasites nor require polluting chemicals to control them.

But how sweet must be the upside: working in a community and working for the community. Working for a team whose values you share and respect. Having an environment where sharing information about financial progress and strategic ambitions is considered the civilised norm.

As a man who's spent chunks of his life in America and China, Erdal has seen the corrosive effects of both rampant capitalism and "proletarian" dictatorships.

Employee ownership, he argues, gives people more satisfying working lives than they ever thought possible. My interest is more sybaritic. They do a mean Finnan haddie.