Raymond Russell

Employee ownership and internal governance

Abstract This paper is designed to counter Oliver Williamsons hypothetical ‘Peer Group’ model of organization with a discussion of three prosperous populations of employee-owned firms: worked-owned scavenger companies, taxi cooperatives, and professional partnerships such as the large law firm. It will be shown here that these firms are formed, endure and prevail over their competition for reasons that Williamson, more than anyone else, has taught us to appreciate. In particular, this paper will argue that the metering problems and human asset considerations that are so prominently featured in Williamsons work are crucial for understanding the success of these firms.

Cooperatives and the business cycle: The Israeli case☆

Abstract This paper uses data from Israel to explore the impact of changing economic conditions on the formation and dissolution of worker cooperatives. We find only mixed support for the widely held notion that cooperative formations conform to a counter-cyclical pattern. Foundings of Israeli worker cooperatives appear to respond counter-cyclically to GDP growth, but procyclically to unemployment. There is stronger evidence for countercyclicality in the dissolutions of these cooperatives, as they at least appear quite resistant to economic downturns. In general, we find that the dynamics of this population are driven less by economic conditions than by political and institutional factors.

Forms and Extent of Employee Participation in the Contemporary United States.

In recent years American businesses have shown increasing interest in employee participation in a number of forms. Such innovations as employee stock ownership plans, profit sharing, labormanagement committees, quality circles, and work redesign all appear to be substantially more popular in the contemporary United States than they have been in the past. Research on the impact of these programs, however, suggests that they tend to have either negligible or at best only short-lived effects. And American managers continue to shy away from the major commitments that appear needed to increase the likelihood that these efforts to increase employee participation will have both significant and lasting effects.

Class Formation in the Workplace The Role of Sources of Income

Efforts to operationalize “ownership” in class formation research have emphasized diferences in power among ownership categories and have neglected the crucial question of whether an individual works for profit or for a wage. The importance of this variable is highlighted with data from the Boston taxi industry in which drivers differ little in control over their work but differ greatly in the way their work is compensated. In recent years, fleet owners have consciously manipulated these differences to displace a unionized labor force that drives for commissions with ostensibly self-employed drivers who rent their cabs by the shift.

Workplace democracy and organizational communication

This article is an edited transcription of an address given to the preconference on Democracy in Organizations, sponsored by the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association, November 1996, in San Diego. The author argues that democratic organizations are fostered by particular kinds of work, people, and social situations that require communication aimed at cooperation, consensus‐building, and shared decision making.

Demographic and Environmental Influences on the Diffusion of Changes Among Israeli Kibbutzim, 1990–2001

This study examines the diffusion of 34 innovations among Israels 240 nonreligious kibbutzim from 1990 through 2001. The changes involve transfers of the authority of the general assembly to independent boards of directors and specialized committees or experts, privatization of consumption, and increasing inequality in compensation. We track year-to-year transitions among six relationships toward each innovation: not considering, rejected, discussing, decided to adopt, implementing, and using. Single-year transitions from “not considering” to “using” are relatively rare. Most innovations go through periods of discussion or implementation before being adopted. Innovations face substantial risks of being rejected at every stage. At each stage, acceptance of innovations by other organizations increases the likelihood of acceptance, implementation, and retention. The effects of organizational size and age on innovations are not what classic theories of the “degeneration” of democratic workplaces predict. Recent changes in the kibbutzim appear instead to be an institutionalized response to market shocks.

Antecedents and consequences of the adoption of market-based compensation by Israeli Kibbutzim

This chapter analyzes the antecedents and consequences of transformations that have recently been occurring among Israeli kibbutzim. After serving for nearly a century as some of the worlds best known examples of organizations that distribute resources “from each, according to ability, to each according to need,” most kibbutzim now pay their members differential salaries on the basis of the market value of their work.

An Old Idea Whose Time Has Come Again

‘‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and Property.’’ That is what the Declaration of Independence would have said, if Thomas Jefferson had gotten his way. It was Jefferson’s colleagues on the committee drafting the Declaration who made him replace his proposed right to property with the more vague ‘‘pursuit of happiness.’’ Jefferson’s fellow Virginian James Madison shared his view that ownership of property should be acknowledged as a right, and wanted this right to be guaranteed by the Constitution. The Citizen’s Share: Putting Ownership Back into Democracy, by Joseph R. Blasi, Richard B. Freeman, and Douglas L. Kruse, begins with the writings of the Founders, and uses them to make the case that the distribution of property ownership should be returned to the central place it once occupied in American national policy. The Founders viewed the concentration of property ownership as a threat to the stability of democracy, and shared with Jefferson the view that ‘‘legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property’’ (p. 16). During the first century of this nation’s existence, this general aim of broadening the distribution of property was embodied in numerous pieces of legislation, from grants of land to Revolutionary War veterans as a reward for their service, through the Homestead Act of 1862. In contemporary economies, in which most people work for companies with many employees, the most practical way to broaden the ownership of property is no longer with individual homesteads, but is instead in the sharing of ownership and/or profits with a firm’s employees. This book makes the case for wider use of employee ownership and profit sharing, both as a goal of national policy, and as ways to motivate employees of individual firms. It would be difficult to find three authors who are better qualified for this task. For more than three decades, sociologist Joseph Blasi has been the nation’s leading authority on employee stock ownership. For most of this time, the economist Douglas Kruse has been Blasi’s colleague and coauthor in a series of increasingly larger studies of employee shareholding in the United States. In 2012, Kruse was appointed to serve as a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors. Economist Richard Freeman is a well-known authority on labor unions and compensation. In the introduction and Chapter One, the authors cover the period from the Revolutionary War to the Homestead Act. The authors found more quotable lines from the Founders than they could integrate into the essay, so Chapter One ends with an appendix containing ten pages of additional quotes from John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. This is more than any reader can digest at one sitting, but I share the authors’ The Citizen’s Share: Putting Ownership Back into Democracy, by Joseph R. Blasi, Richard B. Freeman, and Douglas L. Kruse. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. 293pp.

Participation, Influence, and Worker-Ownership

38.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780300192254. Review Essays 21