Bibliographic Materials for Employee Ownership Research

Posted by Steve Freeman^[1] , October 15, 2011

Scholars from many disciplines provide a wealth of diverse perspectives and research on employee ownership and other forms of shared capitalism. The lack of a well-institutionalized curriculum and established bibliography, however, can be an obstacle for those interested in getting the big picture or generally learning more. To provide access to the full range of literature, The Foundation for Enterprise Development (FED) and the Employee Ownership Foundation (EOF) support two databases. Here is a brief introduction to them and also the multidisciplinary sources from which employee ownership research materials may be drawn.

The Curriculum Library on Employee Ownership (CLEO) is designed to aid teachers and students by providing educatoinal material on employee ownership . The materials collected on Aspen Institute Center for Business Education’s Caseplace are designed to serve as “The Internet Home for Teaching about Employee Ownership.” As of July 15, 2011, the database included more than 500 entries. It emphasizes case studies, but includes other materials as well, including seminal employee ownership works and other important employee ownership research, which I added as Part I of an Employee Ownership Comprehensive Bibliographies and Database Update Project.

For research purposes, FED and EOF also sponsored bibliographic research  including material on how to use relevant bibliographic citation manager software. See  my researsch report,  Part II: Development of Bibliographical Database for Employee Ownership Research ^[2]

In addition to these dedicated databases, however, interested scholars may also want to understand and use the multidisciplinary sources from which we’ve drawn materials.

The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)  Web of Knowledge Citation Index is a comprehensive index of scientific literature. It includes a complete listing of the references cited by a particular article and, correspondingly, the works which cite that article. There are shortcomings to equating importance with citation counts, including: (1) Influence beyond the narrow scientific community is overlooked, as a book or magazine article read by millions may not generate scientific citations.^[3]; and (2) Citation counts are sometimes more a function of funding, gamesmanship and publishing processes than good work. Yet despite the concerns, ISI citation counts serve as a proxy for how influential a work is within a scholarly/scientific community. A June 15, 2011 ISI search of the topic "employee ownership" or ESOP ^[4]. Here are the top ten listings:

Google Scholar is a less precise but more comprehensive database creating rankings based not only citation counts, but also other factors such as links. Google Scholar  is a somewhat haphazard source.  Listings may include highly biased work, work based on ungrounded assertions and/or assertions that are just plain wrong, and the database is filled with errors of all types. Nevertheless, because it accounts for populatiry and because it includes books and non- peer reviewed articles. Google Scholar serves as a proxy for use in the larger world of practitioners and policy-makers.

Here is the June 15, 2011 Google Scholar top ten:

The database for Amazon Books lists 1,350 books that are at least tangentially about "employee ownership.” ^[5] Amazon provides three sorting systems to identify notable books: Relevance (R), Sales (S) and Customer Rating (CR).

I have been unable to ascertain how Amazon determines and ranks relevance, and I am somewhat suspicious about it's constant changing (Is it churning the ranking to try to sell more books?), but its June 15, 2011 list of twelve most relevant books seems a good one: