Toward a Typology of Employee Ownership

Abstract

Employee ownership has received considerable attention in recent years, in part due to claims that it enhances work satisfaction, increases productivity and profitability, and brings some measure of workers' control to the production process. Research in the field, however, indicates that such links are not inevitable and that different forms of employee ownership have different effects on companies and their workforces. Without this recognition, subsequent research and policy recommendations will suffer. The author argues the need to resolve a number of terminological and definitional problems in the field, and contributes to this task through the development of a typology of employee ownership. Three general types of employee ownership-direct ownership, employee stock ownership plans, and producer cooperatives-are isolated and compared according to eight classificatory factors. Subtypes of each of these categories are also advanced. Recognizing the wide variation in employee ownership forms will allow social scientists to explain more clearly the benefits and deficiencies associated with these new ownership arrangements.