Center for the Study of Social Organization

Shared Capitalism at Work: Employee Ownership, Profit Sharing, and Broad-based Stock Options
What have we learned about the incidence, the dynamics, and the potential impacts on corporate performance from the Shared Capitalism Project conducted at the National Bureau for Economic Research over the last decade? This talk will focus on recent General Social Survey data on employee stock ownership, profit sharing, and broad-based stock options in the U.S. and research on how these practices function inside the corporation using a sample of over 40,000 workers. (Chapter 2-5) The work is forthcoming in April 2010 from the University of Chicago Press. Click for chapters: http://www.nber.org/books/krus08-1/

Joseph Blasi is a professor and sociologist at the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University where he teaches the undergraduate and graduate courses on corporate governance.  He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research interests include economic sociology, the social and economic history of the corporation, and public policy. He studies the relationship between the division of rewards, power, and prestige in organizations and performance using large datasets. His books and articles have addressed different systems of work and broad-based employee ownership, profit sharing, and stock options in corporations, countries, industry sectors, (such as Silicon Valley), and historical periods. His latest book, Shared Capitalism at Work (with Douglas Kruse and Richard Freeman), will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2010. Current projects include a study of reward systems and company culture in major corporations and the American economic history of broad-based profit sharing and ownership.