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Democratic Differences: How Type of Ownership Affects Workplace Democracy and its Broader Social Effects

Sharing Ownership, Profits, and Decision-Making in the 21st Century

ISBN: 978-1-78190-750-4

Publication date: 9 December 2013

Abstract

Purpose

To examine how different types of ownership, including investor-owned, employee-owned, and mixed models, affect the dynamics of participatory practices in the workplace, and the broader social effects of these differences.

Design/methodology/approach

Brings together literature from democratic theory and empirical research in workplace participation and employee ownership. The first step is to articulate the range of democratic practices from nondemocratic to strongly democratic. The essay then discusses the different forms that participation can take and the threshold for what can be considered democratic participation. It then considers different models of ownership and the impact of ownership type on participatory practices.

Findings

It is found that investor-owned firms cannot be considered strongly democratic and that worker cooperatives are more likely to be strongly democratic and cannot fall below the threshold of weak democracy. However, strong democracy is not necessarily a feature of worker cooperatives.

Originality/value

Little work has been done to consider the way the type of ownership affects the kind or degree of democratic practices that may be present in an enterprise.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgments

The support the author has received as a J. Robert Beyster and Michael W. Huber Fellow through the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, including the opportunity to present some of these ideas in Beyster Fellows Workshops and Beyster Symposia has been vital to the development of this paper, and for this the author is most grateful. He also thanks Mary Ann Beyster and the Foundation for Enterprise Development for supporting this research. Finally, the author thanks Doug Kruse and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Citation

Kaswan, M.J. (2013), "Democratic Differences: How Type of Ownership Affects Workplace Democracy and its Broader Social Effects", Sharing Ownership, Profits, and Decision-Making in the 21st Century (Advances in the Economic Analysis of Participatory & Labor-Managed Firms, Vol. 14), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 261-294. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0885-3339(2013)0000014011

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited