Who Will Benefit from ESOPs?

[Excerpt] In the past decade, the number of worker-owned firms or ESOPs (Employee Stock Ownership Plans) has been growing geometrically. The national law granting tax incentives to ESOPs was passed in 1975, and since then several other pieces of legislation promoting employee ownership have passed at the federal level and in eight state legislatures. As a result of the technical assistance and industrial revenue bonds that some states now provide for ESOP development, and as a result of demonstrable tax, productivity, labor relations and even marketing advantages, business has taken note of the ESOP option. Several thousand ESOPs have started and scores of reports on employee ownership have appeared in the popular press and in business and trade publications

Workplace democracy and social change

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Dissolving the iron cages? Tocqueville, michels, bureaucracy and the perpetuation of elite power

Modern management theory often forgets more than it remembers. 'What's new?' is the refrain. Yet, we suggest, there is much that we should already know from which we might appropriately learn, 'Lest we forget'. The current paper takes its departure from two points of remembrance that bear on the sustained assaults on bureaucracy that have been unleashed by the critiques of recent years. These critiques include the new public management literature as well as its inspiration in the new literature of cultural entrepreneurialism. Both promise to dissolve bureaucracy's iron cage. We explain, using the classical political themes of oligarchy, democracy, and the production of elite power, why we should consider such transubstantiation alchemical by confronting contemporary discussions with the wisdom of an earlier, shrewder knowledge, whose insights we need to recall to understand the complexity of the hybridizations between supposedly opposite models of organizations. Copyright © 2006 SAGE