 Employee ownership and the drive to do business responsibly: a study of the John Lewis PartnershipJohn Storey and Graeme Salaman Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 2017, vol. 33, issue 2, 339-354 Abstract: As a means towards revealing both the strategic and the day-to-day operational practicalities of managing a ‘responsible business’, this paper reports on research conducted over an extended period in the John Lewis Partnership (JLP). This is a major retail organization based in the UK which operates at scale (90,000 employees and annual sales of £11 billion). It has sustained itself as an employee-owned enterprise for nearly a century, and it makes explicit claims to conduct itself in a ‘responsible manner’ which differs markedly from the notions of responsibility maintained by many conventional businesses. But what do these commitments mean in practice and what compromises, if any, do they entail or require, and crucially how are these tensions managed? We find that there are many lessons that conventional organizations could learn from this case, and yet we also show that the process of managing in this responsible way is a practical accomplishment that requires considerable conceptual and applied skills. Keywords: capitalist system; firm strategy; firm objectives; organizational behaviour; decision making; business administration (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:oxford:v:33:y:2017:i:2:p:339-354. Access Statistics for this article Oxford Review of Economic Policy is currently edited by Christopher Adam More articles in Oxford Review of Economic Policy from Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited |
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