Employee Stock Ownership as a Gift Exchange

Posted on 3 January 2012

Professor Andrew Pendleton spoke on the subject of ‘employee stock ownership as a gift exchange’ at a symposium on ‘Shared Capitalism’ in San Diego, California in early December.

Staff Photo, Professor Andrew Pendleton

The symposium was organised by Professor Joseph Blasi of the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University, USA, and was supported by gifts from John Menke of Menke and Associates, San Francisco and from Mary Ann Beyster and J.Robert Beyster of the Foundation for Enterprise Development.  The symposium honoured the achievements of Louis Kelso, one of the fathers of employee ownership in the United States.

The symposium was organised to consider the work of outstanding young American scholars supported by the Beyster Fellowship programme to work on employee ownership.   This fellowship programme is organised by Rutgers University.  Professor Pendleton is a Faculty Fellow at Rutgers and a mentor on the fellowship programme.  He has recently been an academic visitor at Rutgers.  

In his presentation, Andrew argued that employee share ownership can be seen as a gift from companies to their employees and this encourages norms of reciprocity within companies, thereby generating employee commitment.