Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs)

This book, written by the leading experts in the field, offers a comprehensive look at the factors behind the remarkable growth in employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) in public companies over the past few years. The contributors discuss the legal and financial structure, actual uses, and practical implications of ESOPs in publicly held companies, demonstrating how ESOPs can be an effective means of both improving corporate performance and discouraging hostile takeovers. Particular attention is given to the actual impact of ESOPs on companies, shareholders, employees, and taxpayers.

Capitalism now reigns triumphant -- but in the process has created dramatic inequalities of wealth and left many individuals feeling disconnected. Backed by enthusiastic support from a wide array of legislators, corporate leaders, Nobel laureates, environmentalists, and social and political activists, The Ownership Solution shows how to humanize and localize free enterprise by using ownership as a means for engaging more people in its design.

The privatization revolution, profit or revenue sharing, and employee participation in enterprise decision making are some of the major characteristics of modern capitalism. Such features can be observed in almost all countries, including Western developed, Third World, and primarily ex-socialist countries. The diffusion of stock ownership, the promotion of economic and industrial democracy, and the globalization of production and finance present new challenges and opportunities and reflect important structural economic and political changes. This book examines all these issues and provides valuable information and suggestions for labor-management relations and international business cooperation.

This reference provides policymakers, practitioners, and scholars with important work on the latest developments in new technology and macropolitical organization. The contributors, eminent scholars from a variety of disciplines and countries, examine the economic, political, and sociocultural forces which have brought about new developments and a potential future for organizational democracy around the world.

Team-working, partnership, quality circles, works councils, industrial democracy, empowerment - are they distinct and innovative arrangements or is it a case of new wine in old bottles? In the post war period we have seen numerous forms of organizational participation sometimes as experiments, sometimes as negotiated expediency, and sometimes as hype. Different ideas have emerged from different parts of the world, in different industries, at different times with different objectives. In this book four experienced international analysts take the longer view and look at the changing forms of - and changing debates around - orgnaizational participation. The review an extensive literature of experiments and practical experiences through a critical evaluation of the available data to reach balanced conclusions about the importance and utility of this concept for organizations now and in the future.

This is the first volume in a new Oxford series that is designed to provide policymakers, practitioners, and academics with important works of reference on significant developments in participative practice in organizations. The book looks at how trends toward participation, co-determination, self-management, and cooperatives fared during the 1970s and 1980s, which, after a surge of optimism and increased democratization in the preceding two decades, have seen widespread and severe setbacks to this process in industrialized countries. The contributors, representing a number of countries and disciplines, examine the economic, technological, political, and socio-cultural forces at work in the past decade, the influence they have exerted, and the future prospects for organizational democracy worldwide.