Contesting Ownership: Employee-Ownership, Staff Participation in the English Care Sector

Aaron Lee Gain () and …dŸl Bozkurt ()
Additional contact information
Aaron Lee Gain: University of Brighton (UK)
…dŸl Bozkurt: University of Sussex (UK)

Journal of Entrepreneurial and Organizational Diversity, 2023, vol. 12, issue 1, 90-117

Abstract: This article investigates how care workers understood ownership and experienced employee-ownership through the exercise of workplace participation and control. To date much of the scholarly work has focused on formal governance arrangements, types of participation and the limitations of worker control, in particular debating the validity of the degeneration thesis. Furthermore, studies tend to be concentrated on small-scale cooperatives or specific marginal examples, but employee-owned enterprises have also been introduced in other sectors, including in English health, social care and well-being sectors. By drawing on two case studies providing care services, this study brings new insights by centring on how staff understood, embraced, and subsequently contested the foundational concept of ownership. The subsequent implications for intraorganisational conflict and the lived experience of staff are explored within a theoretical framework based on (1) how different social science disciplines embrace the concept of ownership, (2) workplace participation within employee-owned entities and (3) the unique characteristics of care services. The paperÕs originality lies in combining new empirical data in the context of these three areas. This contribution enhances our understanding of how employees interpret being Òan ownerÓ, as well as informing scholarly and public-policy debates about the future models for care provision.

Keywords: Employee-Ownership; Ownership; Worker Participation and Control; Public Service Mutuals; Health and Social Care (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M10 M12 M14 M54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://jeodonline.com/jeod_articles/contesting-ow ... english-care-sector/ (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:trn:csnjrn:v:12:i:1:p:90-117

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Entrepreneurial and Organizational Diversity from European Research Institute on Cooperative and Social Enterprises Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Barbara Franchini ().