Academic Interest in Employee Ownership Blossoms

Thanks to the efforts of the Foundation for Enterprise Development, the Beyster Institute at the Rady School of Management, Professor Joseph Blasi at Rutgers, and the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, academic interest in employee ownership is finally coming of age after a long period of being largely ignored. At a June 28-29 gathering of researchers at the Second Annual Beyster Fellowship Symposium, over 50 scholars reported on a variety of exciting new research projects underway. The researchers came from business schools as well as from economics, history, organizational development, and philosophy departments. In general, the researchers agree that employee ownership has been shown to have significant positive effects for companies and employees, although there are important exceptions. Much of the new research is looking to dig deeper to find what conditions are most conducive to employee ownership and why it is adopted in some firms but not others.