What Moves Between the Roots

Abstract

This book began at a desk, with an owner, a worker and a leader each holding a question about who owns the work. It has followed the idea of employee ownership from Louis Kelso's newspaper plan and the first stone of a Basque workshop in 1956, through three decades of research, six objections, two deep cases and four houses that made their purpose permanent, to a field manual, a measurement sheet, six conversations and a page for one household. It is time to read the whole once, the way the house reads any economic arrangement: as a living system. The research said one thing so consistently that it is worth stating a last time. Ownership is associated with modestly better outcomes for firms and for the people in them, and the association is much stronger where ownership comes with information, voice and fair treatment. Kruse, Freeman and Blasi's sentence carries it: workers can gain by sharing, "but whether this happens is contingent on other workplace policies." Every chapter since has been, in one way or another, about those other policies.