The 2009 symposium was broken up into two sessions: morning – how fit and resilient are ESOP companies in the current economic crisis?; afternoon – given their stability and long-term perspectives, are ESOP companies hotbeds for green management and making the business case for sustainable development?...

The paper by Logue and Yates was a jumping off point for the participants that led the discussion on to broader topics such as the survivability of ESOP companies, a question that has yet to be answered in the ESOP community. In fact, the idea that the survival of an ESOP company and the survival of a company are two distinctly different topics that needed to be considered separately was an issue on the table that led to more questions the community and advocates in the room agreed needed to be answered such as – if the ESOP buys the company time before failing, do you still consider it a failure if it did stay in business and keep people employed after it should have folded? Another key issue for discussion was whether employee representation on a company's board of directors is a good or bad development.

The afternoon session quickly morphed into a rapid fire discussion on sustainability of ESOP companies and what needs to be done to make the ownership model a sustainable business model in the larger business community. The question about the value of an ESOP company and whether it can weather an economic crisis better than a traditionally organized business was a very engaging topic for those present as well.

Also, a recent press release announced a shared capitalism fellowship program:

Rutgers Awards Fellowships on Shared Capitalism

School of Management and Labor Relations brings together top experts

May 22, 2009

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – At a time when policymakers and academics are examining fundamental questions about corporate governance and the shape of American capitalism, Rutgers University's School of Management and Labor Relations (SMLR) has brought together – for the first time – 11 top experts and up-and-coming scholars of employee ownership, profit sharing and broad-based stock options to learn about the role that shared capitalism plays in corporations and the economy in general.

SMLR's new, annual fellowship program was established with a major gift from J. Robert Beyster and Mary Ann Beyster of La Jolla, California, with a grant from the Foundation for Enterprise Development.

Dean David Finegold noted that SMLR has some of the world's leading faculty who study employee ownership and is building on that strength to expand research in the field. "The idea of the interdisciplinary fellowships is to bring together and support scholars in a broad range of fields in the social sciences and humanities, and at a range of academic institutions, to carry out independent research under the mentorship of Rutgers' experts in the field," Finegold said.

The fellowship program is coordinated by two Beyster faculty fellows at Rutgers, professors Joseph Blasi and Douglas Kruse. The first cohort of Beyster fellows will work on a wide variety of projects.

• Edward Carberry, an assistant professor in business-society management at the Rotterdam School of Management and the first Beyster visiting professor, will report on how employee ownership influences the distribution of power and wealth within corporations.
  
• Joe Hsueh, a doctoral candidate in systems dynamics at MIT's Sloan School of Management, will build an educational computer simulation on the dynamic effects of alternative investment strategies, timing of those strategies for a technology start-up, and tradeoffs of decisions related to compensation and ownership. It also will simulate their impact on employee motivation, productivity, risk, product development, revenue growth, wealth creation and distribution.
  
• Pierre Kremp, a doctoral candidate in sociology at Princeton University, will probe the diffusion of stock ownership in the United States and its consequences on wealth inequality, including a comparison of employee stock ownership and nonemployee stock ownership.
  
• Fidan Ana Kurtukus, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, will explore how firms facing different economic conditions use one form of shared capitalism or another to buffer against economic shocks.
  
• Blasi, a professor of human resource management at SMLR, is examining the social and economic history of shared capitalism and related government policy in the United States.
  
• Kruse, a professor of human resource management at SMLR, is analyzing decades of academic scholarship in shared capitalism.

A second group of Rutgers fellows, supported by a grant from the Employee Ownership Foundation, are:

• Yuan Jiang, a doctoral candidate in industrial relations and human resources at SMLR, will begin a teaching position at Indiana-Purdue University next year and will consider the relationships among various forms of employee ownership programs and employees' cooperative behaviors to achieve team and company goals.
  
• Nien-Chi Liu, an associate professor and director of the Graduate Institute of Human Resource Management at the National Central University in Taiwan, will investigate broad-based stock incentives and corporate performance and governance.
  
• Paige Ouimet, an assistant professor at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will evaluate how employee ownership programs influence within-firm dynamics among management, labor and shareholders, and how any surplus associated with increased productivity following the adoption of an employee ownership plan is shared among these groups.
  
• Ajnesh Prasad, a doctoral candidate in organizational behavior and industrial relations at the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto, will delve into the relationship between organizations' employee ownership plans and their level of engagement with corporate social responsibility.
  
• Peter Thompson, an assistant clinical professor at the College of Business Administration at the University of Illinois at Chicago, will perform an innovative laboratory behavioral economics study of employee ownership.

The fellows program complements the creation of the J. Robert Beyster Professorship of Employee Ownership at SMLR, the "world's first endowed professorship in this field," according to Finegold.