Maureen A. Scully

Interpreting Silence and Voice in the Workplace A Conversation about Tempered Radicalism among Black and White Women Researchers

This article began as an exploration of Black and White women’s efforts to address inequality and make changes in the workplace, but we soon turned the mirror back onto ourselves as Black and White women engaged in change efforts. Our struggles over interpreting the data revealed how Black and White women struggle to make sense of whether the other is a reliable ally. Black women wonder whether White women will raise their voices or be silent yet again. White women wonder whether Black women can trust that silence is sometimes a strategy. Charting a course through defensiveness, questioning, and some distinct “aha” moments led us to understand our phenomenon and ourselves more deeply. We end this article at a way station, not a final destination, with open questions about the prospects for cross-race collaboration.

Mobilizing the Wealthy: Doing “Privilege Work” and Challenging the Roots of Inequality:

Wealthy individuals stand to gain materially from economic inequality and, moreover, have shaped many organizational and societal practices that perpetuate economic inequality. Thus, they are unlikely allies in the effort to remedy economic inequality. In this article, however, we study the mobilization of a small group of wealthy activists who join underprivileged allies to expose and contest the root causes of wealth consolidation; they offer an instructive alternative to “philanthrocapitalism,” whereby the wealthy give after extreme accumulation. Our study contributes to the growing literature on inequality and organizations by recognizing how inequality is reproduced through organizations, cognizant that efforts to halt this reproduction will likely be contested by the wealthy. Our study examines how advocacy by the wealthy may be challenging, but it may garner attention because it is unexpected. We derive the concept of “privilege work” from our observations of an often awkward and fraught process that enables the wealthy to engage with their own privilege, use their insider knowledge of wealth accumulation as a lever for change, and work respectfully with underprivileged allies rather than invoking superior status.

Recapitalizing the U.S. Economy: Envisioning the Role of Broad Employee Ownership: The Scholarly Agenda Advances

Recapitalizing the U.S. economy continues to be a critical topic throughout 2010, because of the turmoil caused by the serious collapse in the financial infrastructure in the U.S. over the preceding years. Questions are still being raised in many quarters - the policy arena, the press, community groups, and business schools - about what a sustainable economy looks like and how it would benefit the greatest number of people.How is capital to be generated, deployed, and distributed? Capital refers to company stock that owns the capital of corporations, pools of capital concentrated in various funds, the capital provided by nature’s abundance, the human capital we build in organizations, and the social capital in organizations and communities.The researchers at this symposium are investigating the premise that employee ownership - including equity compensation, profit sharing, and democratic work practices - can play an integral role in economic revitalization through the creation and distribution of capital. Recapitalization in finance typically refers to a change in the capital structure of a corporation in order to create more stability and better performance. We are using this term in the general sense of the role of increasing the equity of the American worker in U.S. capitalism in order to contribute to making the economy more stable and sustainable.To understand whether and how employee ownership can play a role in recapitalizing the economy, scholars pursue specific questions that contribute to the bigger picture (see details in section 4). They examine how employees respond to the perceived risk of ownership shares as compensation, employees’ satisfaction and motivation, and their compensation levels. They look at how firms with employee ownership perform, marshal human capital to produce innovations, and return higher value to shareholders. They compare these dynamics across industries and assess the prevalence and spread of employee ownership in different forms.

Shared Capitalism and Employee Ownership: The Scholarly Agenda

The ideas of employee ownership and various forms of profit sharing in corporations have been around for a long time. The shorthand proposition is: if employees feel valued, they create value. More precisely, if they are owners and if they are satisfied by their connection to and stake in a greater whole, then they may, in turn, boost productivity. Employee ownership is gaining new attention in academia with the emergence of many new and young scholars in the field, partly as a result of fellowship programs to support them. Several current issues make now a good time to have a fresh scholarly discussion about employee ownership, to see what ideas it might hold for rethinking the governance structures of business. This discussion is neither a review of the research literature nor a verbatim summary of the symposium, but rather an overview of the main issues discussed there. Some broad implications for both future research and future policy are noted. -The current state of pensions and investments in the financial markets is causing a wide range of people to reconsider how to accrue and hold onto assets that reflect their years of hard work. While employee-owners also lost on the value of their investments during the recent economic collapse, how can employee ownership play a responsible role in retirement savings? -Innovations in clean technology, biopharmaceuticals, and other emerging technologies represent a new paradigm of economic growth. New ventures in these areas will rely on talented employees contributing their effort in risky start-up enterprises. To what extent can broad-based employee ownership create incentives for groups of innovators and supplement venture capital for new enterprises while supporting a more sustainable pipeline of innovations? -The widening compensation gap between top executives and other workers is causing politicians, shareholders, and employees to reconsider who builds the assets of an organization and who should share in them. How can employee ownership provide new models for corporate governance and wealth sharing? These are just some of the forces and questions that made this symposium on employee ownership timely. Interestingly, three months after the symposium, in October of 2009, Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize for Economics, for her work on the role of the commons in economic governance. She showed how collective ownership can be viable, despite skepticism from mainstream economic theorists that free-rider hazards will hamper it. Altogether, this is a propitious time to take a critical look at the research issues and realities of employee ownership. A group of researchers from a range of disciplines, many having recently incorporated aspects of ownership into their research, has a series of studies on employee ownership well underway. Their work examines the varieties and extent of employee ownership; the conditions under which it will succeed or fail; the mechanisms by which it can generate value for individuals, teams, firms, communities, and society; and the implications for policy.

Caroline A. Bartel, Steven Blader, and Amy Wrzesniewski, eds.: Identity and the Modern Organization

This book represents, appropriately enough, a vigorous effort by identity scholars to forge some kind of identity for their community, whose research spans disciplines, methods, and levels of analysis. Identity research as a label does not even adequately capture the range of projects on organizational identification, identity plurality, and identity processes. A subtext of the book is whether there is a shared conceptual base that pulls together these related but quite different approaches. “Identity” comes from the Latin for being the same. At first I was looking for enduring commonalities among the chapters, as in this sense of identity. But the way identity is increasingly used in the social sciences is to refer to how individuals and organizations differentiate themselves and emphasize their distinctiveness. I came to enjoy that each chapter had a very distinctive angle of vision on identity.