The Real World of Employee Ownership

by John Logue, Jacquelyn Yates, William Greider

Overview

Using data from an extensive study of employee-owned companies in Ohio, where employee ownership is a well-developed trend, this book offers a strong empirical portrait of firms with Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs). It describes how these plans work and places their emergence and change in a historical context. John Logue and Jacquelyn Yates examine firms that have succeeded in employee ownership and those with failed plans. Some companies, they find, are committed to the concept of employee ownership, and others merely use ESOPs as a financing tool.

Detailed information resulting from multiple surveys allows the authors to draw well-grounded conclusions regarding the question of why some employee-owned firms outperform others. The bottom line, they find, is that employee-owned firms that "do it all," implementing features such as employee participation and communication about finances, training, and cultural change, systematically outperform their conventional competitors. They also have an advantage over firms that understand employee ownership incompletely, if it all, and yet claim to adopt its methods.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801433498
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	11/21/2001
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

John Logue was Professor of Political Science at Kent State University and Director of the Ohio Employee Ownership Center. He was coeditor or coauthor of many books and a frequent contributor to The Progressive. Jacquelyn S. Yates is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Salem campus of Kent State University and a faculty associate at the Ohio Employee Ownership Center. William Greider, national affairs correspondent for The Nation magazine, is author of One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism.

Table of Contents

	List of Figures	ix
	List of Tables	x
	Foreword	xiii
	Acknowledgments	xv
	Introduction: From Frontier Egalitarianism to Employee Ownership	1
1	The Real World of Employee Ownership in Ohio	21
2	Communication and Training: Building a Learning Environment	46
3	Participation: Can Workers Run the Firm?	72
4	Union Brothers and Sisters in the Boardroom?	110
5	Do ESOPs Mature? Modeling Performance and Profits	132
6	Employee Ownership and Public Policy	158
Appendix 1	About the Ohio Survey	181
Appendix 2	Results of the 1992-93 Ohio ESOP Survey	190
	Notes	225
	Works Cited	233
	Index	241

What People are Saying About This

Gar Alperovitz

The most important single book on employee ownership-the one to read! Logue and Yates analyze three decades of experience and show how we can now take the next, quantum jump forward in democratizing the American economy.

Corey Rosen

John Logue and Jacqueline Yates have combined scholarly precision with real-world involvement to produce a clearheaded, practical examination of what makes employee ownership work —and not work. This is an invaluable guide for both students and practitioners.

Editorial Reviews

I see this book as necessary reading for any scholar studying employee stock ownership program issues.... Management scholars will find the modeling and the ESOP performance analysis quite useful as well. Finally, Greider's foreword calls us to consider ESOPs as a necessary transformation in our world of work. Logue and Yates certainly move us well in that direction.

American Journal of Sociology

I see this book as necessary reading for any scholar studying employee stock ownership program issues.... Management scholars will find the modeling and the ESOP performance analysis quite useful as well. Finally, Greider's foreword calls us to consider ESOPs as a necessary transformation in our world of work. Logue and Yates certainly move us well in that direction.

-- "American Journal of Sociology"

From the Publisher

"The most important single book on employee ownership-the one to read! Logue and Yates analyze three decades of experience and show how we can now take the next, quantum jump forward in democratizing the American economy."

Gar Alperovitz

"John Logue and Jacqueline Yates have combined scholarly precision with real-world involvement to produce a clearheaded, practical examination of what makes employee ownership work —and not work. This is an invaluable guide for both students and practitioners."

Corey Rosen