Another workplace is possible: Learning to own and changing subjectivities in American employee owned companies

Abstract

Work life in America, as the literature would have it at least, is pretty uniformly miserable. This article will draw on the literature on practice-based learning as well as democratic political change, in order to help show and theorize a way in which capitalist firms form employee owned trusts (an Employee Stock Ownership Plan), and develop an “ownership culture.” Employee Stock Ownership Plans with an ownership culture are fairly wide spread, tend to pay people more, and seem to create an environment in which people are happy to work. While Employee Stock Ownership Plans are not a panacea for all that troubles us, they do seem to go a fair ways towards mitigating some of the work-place-based misery and larger patterns of material inequality that comes with our contemporary moment, and they seem to have been missing from social-scientific thinking about contemporary economic organizing and its possibilities for change.

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