About EO+WD
Welcome! The Research Cluster on Employee Ownership and Workplace Democracy (EO+WD) supports writing and teaching on the changing relationship between employees and their employers.
EO+WD maintains a public available database of employee ownership trusts and perpetual purpose trusts in the United States, and a database on purpose trust service providers. You can access and contribute to that data on our Harvard Dataverse instance.
People
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).
Jenny Everett, Senior Advisor, focuses on EO+WD’s outreach and ecosystem-building. Jenny has over twenty-five years’ experience in the private and non-profit sectors and currently works as an advisor to nonprofits and social impact organizations. She is the former Managing Director of the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE), a program of the Aspen Institute. In this role, she helped to grow ANDE from a fledgling idea to a robust network of over 300 organizations operating in 150 emerging market countries. She led the launch of Regional Chapters in the Andean region, Brazil, Central America/Mexico, East Africa, East and Southeast Asia, India, South Africa and West Africa and managed ANDE’s international team.
The rest of our team is made up of whip-smart, thoughtful undergraduate students from SMU and UTA. Check out their bios below!
History
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.
