About EO+WD

Welcome! The Research Cluster on Employee Ownership and Workplace Democracy (EO+WD) supports research and teaching on the changing relationship between employees and their employers.

Mark C. Hand, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas at Arlington, leads EO+WD. His research investigates how employee ownership trusts differ from other forms of employee ownership; what drives family business owners to consider expanding ownership to employees (or not); and how employee ownership makes firms’ decision-making more democratic (or doesn’t).

In addition to our upcoming speaker series, EO+WD maintains a public available database of employee ownership trusts in the United States. You can access and contribute to that data on our Harvard Dataverse instance.

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EO+WD was initially established in 2022 in partnership with SMU law professor Grant M. Hayden, who explores workplace democracy, and in particular the participation of employee representatives on corporate boards. The cluster’s initial funding came from the Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute, a fellowship from the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing, and Schmidt Futures.