Socially Responsible Entrepreneurship as Innovative Human Resource Practice

Abstract

This article examines how a single entrepreneur-owner of a heavy manufacturing firm in the United States has been influenced by the experience of the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain and the concept of servant leadership as articulated by Robert K. Greenleaf. The case that follows describes how this entrepreneur has attempted to not only sell his company to his employees at below market value but also to engage in a large scale training and development program so the employees may not only exercise ownership but also leadership and governance. His goal is to provide lifelong security and employment for the employees who made his company the success it is.

Keywords

social responsibility human resource management entrepreneurship ethics in organizations change management organization development organization theory complex adaptive systems

Peter Senge (1990) described learning organizations as ones which continually expand their capacity to create their future. This article describes how the Carris Reels Company, a manufacturing firm in the United States, has built just such a learning organization predicated on the core values of trust, mutual respect, inclusivity, human development, shared leadership, ownership, and governance. The impetus to establish a corporate culture that could be best described as a work community is driven by two strategic initiatives; the sale of the company to the employees at below market value by the entrepreneur-owner, and a large scale training program to teach the employees how to run and govern the business.

In 1994, William H. (Bill) Carris, CEO and owner of Carris Reels, articulated a long-term plan (LTP) for his company: “Our goal is to upgrade employees’ health, wealth, and happiness as a result of changing from a traditional, privately held company to an employee-owned and governed organization” (Carris, 1994, p. ii). Carris acknowledges two major influences on his thinking in initiating this project: the practical example of the Mondragon cooperatives of the Basque region of Spain, and the theoretical construction of servant leadership as articulated by Robert K. Greenleaf (1977, 1996). This article will examine these influences and how they were realized at Carris Reels.

The article is organized into several sections. A brief introductory background of Carris Reels is presented in the initial section. This is followed by a section describing the entrepreneurial efforts of the Mondragon cooperatives and how they influenced Carris’ thinking. The next section discusses servant leadership and workplace community building as a strategic vision. The fourth section of the article examines the components of the initiative at Carris Reels. The fifth section details the results of the efforts to build a workplace community at Carris. The final sections of the article discuss the implications of this experience for general human resource theory and the practice of human resource management, and for organizational development and change management theory.

Background: Carris Reels, Inc

Henry Carris, Father of current CEO Bill Carris, began the company in 1951 with just two employees. The company built a variety of sized plywood reels for the storage and shipping of cable, wire, and other products that were wound onto the reels. Over time, the company achieved market dominance in this product line. Henry Carris retired in 1980 and current CEO Bill Carris took over the reins of the company. Since that time, the company has engaged in a number of acquisitions and new endeavors that has broadened the company’s product line considerably to include high-end wooden furniture, wooden shipping pallets, tin, bolts, and plastic tubing. During this expansion, the organization saw its sales rise 415%, and its assets grow 664% (Betit & Brown, 1998). The company grew to over 700 employees in 15 plant locations in eight states (Sanders, 2006). Although the legal name of the organization is the Carris Financial Corporation, the company has informally adopted “the Carris Community of Companies” to be in better alignment with the ongoing strategic initiative of workplace community creation.

Global Entrepreneurship: The Mondragon Cooperatives

The employee-owned organizations known as the Mondragon cooperatives began as manufacturing companies and have had such long-term multidimensional success that they have grown to dominate the market for tools and appliances in Spain. The cooperatives existence and growth was established with an emphasis on collaboration, friendship, consensus decision making, and profitability as a means for serving the common good (Mollner, 1991). They have been described as “ . . . at once more effectively socialist than are doctrinaire socialists, and more militantly capitalist than a right wing Republican. They take the best of both and create a wholly new economic reality” (Schwartz, 1984, p. 16).

The Mondragon Corporacion Cooperativa (MCC) was founded by Father Jose Maria Arizmediarrieta and five workers in 1956 in the town of Mondragon in the Basque region of Spain. Some of the unique aspects of the cooperatives are that all individuals who work at the MCC are employee-owners. As such they are required to personally invest in their organizations. Employees participate in the management and have a voice in the direction of their companies through consensus-based decision making. As the MCC became larger with more companies and employee-owners, it formed the Working People’s Bank which in turn funds more activities by the cooperative. By 1998, the MCC had over 29,000 employee owners and reported assets of approximately $14 billion on revenues of over $6 billion (MacLeod, 1998). Ten years later, the MCC had 120 different companies with 42,000 employee owners. In addition, the cooperatives have built 43 schools and one college (“Mondragon: A Better Way to Go to Work?” 2008).

While the Mondragon cooperatives have enjoyed considerable attention as a model for work design alternatives to the traditional manufacturing work environment, they have received some criticism as well. Critics have argued that too much interpersonal conflict and organizational politics can be observed in behaviors between managers and rank-and-file workers (Kasmir, 1996). While employee-owners at the cooperative acknowledge this as true, they do not wish to see their organizations privatized “because in theory we are worker-owners and decisions are made by the managers as well as the guy who sweeps the floor” (Kasmir, 1996, p. 166). Even taking into consideration, these criticisms, the amazing success rates of the cooperatives make a strong argument for the organizational form: only 3 companies of the 103 formed between 1956 and 1986 had to be shutdown (Whyte & Whyte, 1991). The experience of the MCC deeply influenced the thinking of Bill Carris in his decision to build a workplace community at Carris Reels.

Strategic Vision and Servant Leadership

An unarguable management fact is that creating a corporate vision is an integral part of the strategic planning process. Some authors have gone beyond this. Collins and Porras (1996, 1991) argue that there is a difference between organizational vision and visionary organizations. The visionary organization, according to Collins and Porras, uses vivid and descriptive language to articulate the core values and beliefs that not only give the organization its mission but also its purpose. Bartlett and Ghoshal (1994) agree and state that top management should include in the strategic planning process, the definition of the organization’s purpose. This definition of purpose must be instilled in the rank-and-file followership throughout the organization by creating work environments that give meaning to employees’ work, develop them as individuals, and that move the organization from an economic entity to a social institution. This type of leadership is accomplished by strenuously communicating what the organization stands for.

Bill Carris (1994) demonstrates this type of visionary leadership: “For the longest time I have had a faded, ragged piece of paper taped to the bookcase in my office. It reads: To improve the quality of life for our growing corporate community” (p. 1). This is the opening of the LTP in which Carris articulates his vision for his company. His vision is employee ownership and governance:

. . . the employee-owned and governed company structure will enable individuals to solve their own problems by providing some powerful tools: security (profit), power (resources, money), opportunity (education, services), desire (new emphasis on the improving of their lives and the lives of others). (Carris, 1994, p. 2)

This statement clearly indicates what Carris Reels will stand for in the years after 1994.

In addition to the Mondragon cooperatives, the other major influence that brought Carris to the vision of employee ownership and governance for his company was the writing of AT&T senior executive Robert K. Greenleaf (1977, 1996). Greenleaf believed that a good leader should be a servant of the followership in that the leader should place the values of his or her followers ahead of the leader’s values. Thus, the leader would be assisting the rank-and-file followership to realize their full potential.

The servant-leader is servant first. . . . That person is sharply different from the one who is leader first. . . . The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer is: Do they while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? (Greenleaf, 1977, pp. 13-14)

Other senior corporate executives have embraced this perspective as well. Herman Miller Furniture CEO, Max De Pree (1989), has stated that the art of leadership is “liberating people to do what is required of them in the most effective and humane way possible” (p. xix). He believes that leaders should leave behind them a legacy “ . . . a legacy that takes into account the more difficult, qualitative side of life, one which provides greater meaning, more challenge, and more joy in the lives of those whom leaders enable” (p. 11). How is this accomplished? De Pree (1989) argues this is done by creating a rational work environment. He defines this as a work environment that “ . . . values trust and human dignity and provides the opportunity for personal development and self-fulfillment in the attainment of the organization’s goals” (p. 13).

Carris (1994) saw many positives in the servant leadership style for his organization:

One . . . benefit of moving away from being an organization led by a monarch is that a healthy organization does not owe its values and successes to one individual. . . . Our leadership and governance approach must be one that encourages people to participate as owners and prevents any one individual from defining the goals and values of the organization. (p. 5)

Elements of the Workplace Community at Carris Reels

The elements that compose the initiative to create a workplace community at Carris Reels are employee ownership, employee governance, the training initiative, the Full Circle Program, and the Charitable Giving Committees. Taken together, they represent the organizational vision that establishes the company as a visionary organization.

Employee Ownership

In the 1994 LTP distributed to all employees, Bill Carris suggested the complex transition involved in selling his company to his employees. In it he articulates his two pronged vision for the transition to employee ownership: one, to teach the employees the business, and two, to create a new form of governance. Due to Carris’ leadership style, this transition proposed in the LTP was seen by many as a logical progression from his role as a humane, open, and accessible leader. In an article in the company newspaper, an anonymous company officer reflected this by stating: “the actual transfer of ownership was only one step, and a fairly late one, in a long process of building an employee-owned and governed company” (Horwedal, 1997, p. 1).

The planned transition to employee ownership had a life cycle of 10 to 15 years given the dynamics of the market and the economy. Carris decided to sell his company to his employees (below market value) through an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP). In announcing this planned transition to employee ownership, Carris (1994) credited the employees with the success of the organization, but recognized that often this type of success does not bring with it the financial rewards it might.

Legal owners are very willing to promote “emotional” ownership because it so clearly improves the performance of an organization and consequently, the value of the legal owner . . . it is legal ownership that gives (employees) their fair share of the fruits of their labors and control over the organization to which they devote so much “blood, sweat and tears.” . . . True devotion and loyalty to a company seem to be essential attributes of what ownership should be. Morally, such devotion should be complemented by legal ownership. (p. 6)

The ESOP vesting allocation schedule is nonhierarchical, with top managers receiving relatively equal distributions to the rank-and-file employees. The vesting schedule was established to pay out 30% of the annual allocation evenly divided among all employees, 20% of the annual allocation distribution to be based on seniority with the company, and 50% of the allocation distributed based on salary up to a maximum of $30,000 (adjusted annually for inflation). This type of ownership plan contrasts clearly with other companies’ stock ownership plans that are heavily weighted in favor of top management. At the end of 1995, employees owned 10% of the company, by 1996, 20%, and by the end of 1997 they owned 25% of the company (for more information on the Carris ESOP, see Betit & Brown, 1998; Daley, 1996a; Hahn, 1996; Skiffington, 1996).

Employee Governance

In contrasting governance and management of organizations, governance has been defined as “pervasive power, purpose and wealth of an organization” in comparison with management which can be described as more “defined, objective and neutral” (Block, 1993, p. 6). Carris was quite clear from the outset about his position on employee governance: “My feeling has long been that if employees own the company, they should be involved in the larger philosophical issues affecting it” (Daley, 1996a, p. A-10).

The company created a Corporate Steering Committee (CSC) to oversee the ESOP creation and rollout, as well as begin the guidance of the company reflecting employee ownership and governance. The CSC was composed of seven senior company executives (including Carris) and an elected employee representative for every 50 employees. The initial two decisions regarding the ESOP were made by Carris, however, once the CSC was in place the CSC made the remaining 16 decisions on the design and rollout of the plan. The CSC used consensus-based decision making in the development of alternative plans for the ESOP. The three plans were put before the employees for a vote (one vote per employee) and a plan was selected. Carris Reels was selected as the ESOP Company of the Year in 1997. The announcement of the award indicated that the Carris ESOP was the only one ever so designed.

Training and Development

Carris (1994) recognized the need to train his workers to be better prepared to exercise ownership and governance. Ultimately, he stated, the entire initiative is about each employee’s personal growth:

This company is about personal growth. Whether it is growth in job responsibility, pay, education or psychological and spiritual growth, we need to encourage all! Along with growth within the company, we need to make every effort to promote personal growth when we bring new people into the organization. (p. 12)

As a result of this perspective, Carris Reels embarked on an extensive training and development mission. At the CSC level, training days were allocated every quarter. CSC members were trained in areas such as decision-making techniques, with an emphasis on consensus-based decision making; trust building; and different individual work styles using the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator. Individual needs at the plant level were identified and addressed. A literacy initiative was instituted and training in reading and writing was offered to rank-and-file employees. One plant location had a high percentage of Spanish speaking rank-and-file workers, and an English as a second language program was introduced for their benefit. Additional training programs have been offered to help support the transition to employee ownership and governance such as financial statement analysis, employee performance coaching, and the responsibilities and rights inherent in stock ownership (Hahn, 1996). One aspect of the personal growth and training initiative that has had far-reaching impact is the Full Circle Program.

Full Circle Program

As the rollout of the ESOP and associated training programs began, Bill Carris became aware of a program of travel learning seminars at Augsburg College called the Full Circle Program. Carris believed the program resonated with values underlying the Carris LTP and more specifically the desire for Carris employee owners to grow personally. Employees who wish to participate in the program, submit their names and each month two individuals’ names are drawn (with no consideration for rank or seniority). These individuals are sent on travel learning sabbaticals to developing nations to perform some service capacity. Carris employees have worked on service projects in countries such as South Africa, Namibia, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. The impetus of this program is to have “ . . . participants leave home, reflect on themes central to home life (justice and security, minimum conditions of life, nurturance and survival) and return home to a place that is at once both familiar and newly strange” (Daley, 1996b, p. A-10). On returning home, employees share their experiences through interviews in the company newspaper, and in informal talks with fellow employees. Many have said the experience was life changing (Hewitt, 1997).

Carris believed the Full Circle Program to be important for his employees because “ . . . a program like this not only empowers employees in their own life and their work, it also makes you a world citizen” (Daley, 1996b, p. A-10). The hope is that when employees return home they would transfer their experience to more volunteer projects both at home and in distant locales. Furthermore, Carris saw transferable synergies between the lessons learned and experiences gained in the Full Circle Program with the ever increasing diversity in the U.S. workplace.

Charitable Giving Committee

When Carris announced the LTP to transition ownership of the company to his employees, he included in the LTP a statement that the company should give 10% of its profits to legitimate nonprofit organizations outside of the company. Many employees balked at the amount. Carris, however, would not be moved on this point and in 1996 an allocation process was designed so that each plant site in the company would receive a per capita amount of the annual profits for distribution to local organizations and individuals. The transition to the 10% amount was a gradual one, and by 2001, the company had reached the 7% level of contribution (Rodgers, 2001).

All plant sites within the company elected an employee Charitable Giving Committee. These committees were tasked with receiving and analyzing funding requests from their respective communities, deciding on the allocation of funds, and delivering the funds to the requesting organizations. A key point here is that management does not exercise oversight on the process or the end recipient. Each plant site wrote their own guidelines for the activities of their committees and controlled to whom and how much was given. Mutual trust and respect is the hallmark of the program. The Carris local operations have provided support for many different local community projects including aid to a battered women’s shelter, helping a small local community purchase an ambulance, assistance to a town to help build a Vietnam veterans’ memorial, among other projects (Betit & Brown, 1998).

The Results of Workplace Community Building at Carris

The transition to employee ownership progressed over time, and in January of 2008, the company announced that it was then 100% employee owned. In making the announcement, Carris said “We’ve been working on this for about 12 years and the stock has been slowly transferring over to the employees” however, he stated he still was as convinced as ever that the employees should own a “share of the action” (Edwards, 2008, p. 1). As a result of this landmark moment for the company, Carris Reels was once again named the ESOP Company of the Year. President of the ESOP Association J. Michael Keating lauded the Carris effort:

Carris Reels is an example of the value and potential that employee ownership can bring to (a) company. The employee owners of Carris Reels strive to make their company stronger each day and it shows in the work they do and in the value they place on the individuals who make up their company. (Gwiazdowski, 2008, p. 1)

Implications for HR Practice

Other accolades have been bestowed on the effort at Carris Reels. In 2000 (when the company was 35% employee owned), the Council on Economic Priorities gave one of its annual Corporate Conscience Awards for Employee Empowerment to Carris Reels. The Council stated in its citation for the award that “We urge the business community to follow the lead of these sterling examples . . . pioneering innovations such as those we honor establish a corporate reputation that earns the respect of consumers, investors, activists, and corporate executives alike” (“Bristol-Myers Squibb Receives Global Ethics Award,” 2000, p. 1). Bernie Sanders, who was then a Congressman, spoke on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives about the Carris experience:

Those who work at Carris Reels have moved from employees to owners, from hired workers to stewards of the company and its future. . . . I believe Bill Carris and his employees, and Carris Reels as well, can serve as a model for our Nation. (Sanders, 2006, p. E1019)

Implications for Organizational Development and Change Management Theory

Discussions of change management are embedded in the broader discourse on organizational development theory. The strategic change at Carris Reels is no different in this regard. Historically, organizational development programs have been approached from a top-down philosophical orientation (see, e.g., Greiner & Schein, 1989). This top-down power orientation is determined early on in the life of the company by the organizational culture the founder of the corporation creates (Schein, 1983). In the example of Carris Reels, Bill Carris’ father created an organizational culture of traditional managerial power. However, when Bill Carris assumed control of the organization, he began to reimagine the power structure of his company. Mintzberg (1984) raised the strategic question “who should control the corporation?” and while discussing democratization, concluded that power would remain in the hands of those at the top of the organization, refuting the position of Slater and Bennis (1964) that democracy in organizations is “inevitable.” Discussions of power in organizations have evolved, but conceptually they are largely underpinned by tacit assumptions of the need for rank-and-file workers to have influence without authority, or to attempt to exercise power up the hierarchical chain of command. The assumptions underpinning these discussions are emblematic of a limited form of democracy within organizations (Bradford & Cohen, 1998; Cohen & Bradford, 1991).

Implicit in democracy is enhanced freedom for organizational members. In discussing models of democratization and in examining freedom within human systems, Van Gigch (1976) distinguishes between democratic systems and Marxian Socialist models. Both models imply a top-down power structure. The question this article ultimately asks is as follows: Is it possible to enact a socialist democratic model in capitalist organizations? Carris appears to have instituted an integrative model of change blending the democratic with socialist models in the final structure of the company.

Change Management Processes

John Kotter (1996) in his seminal book Leading Change defines change management in a sequential eight-step process that effectuates change in a linear fashion within a more traditional power hierarchy. This change process model moves somewhat rigidly through its various steps in a manner demonstrating the prepotency of later stages of the model over the earlier stages. Tichy (1983) articulates three domains (technical, political, and cultural) that management must navigate to implement change, also within a top-down power approach to organizational transitions. Similar top-down approaches to change management can be seen in other foundational change management literature (e.g., see Connor & Lake, 1988).

In recognition of the changing dynamics of the business landscape, Kotter (2014) revised his change model in his book Accelerate. In this work, Kotter moved away from the rigid sequential view of the change process and introduced a more integrative perspective on change management. Rather than a linear progression through the process, Kotter argues that the various change steps in his model should occur concurrently and continuously. Additionally, the change agents should come from all levels of the organization, not exclusively in a top-down manner. Furthermore, the change initiative should function as a flexible and organic effort outside of but in confluence with, the organization’s formal hierarchy. A long-standing discussion in the Change Management literature is the nature of change in organizations—Is it evolutionary or revolutionary?

Tushman and Romanelli (1990) and Nadler and Tushman (1988) examine organizational change as an evolutionary process invoking the biological process of metamorphosis. Quinn (1982) also argues that management should guide change incrementally for best advantage. A key point by all of them is that the models of organizational transformation developed in these works still augers for an executive-driven change process. In discussing incremental versus radical change, Daft (1995) enumerates several characteristics of each type of change process. Radical change is a frame-breaking burst that causes the organization to reach a new equilibrium through the transformation of the entire organization. It creates a new structure and management for the organization. Whereas incremental change is a continuous progression of change that maintains the equilibrium of the organization and is achieved through normal structures and management processes. I would argue that the change implemented at Carris Reels is an integrative blend of radical and incremental change made through multiple simultaneous, but not necessarily sequential or coterminous change efforts, both within the current organizational structure, and creating new internal organizational structural mechanisms.

Paradigmatic Change and Complex Adaptive Systems

Jick and Peiperl (2003) argue that organizational change is chaotic and nonlinear in nature. Christensen and Overdorf (2000) state that change is simultaneously disruptive and paradigm shattering, while Beckhard and Harris (1987) assert that change management is a complex process. The understanding of complex, disruptive, paradigm shattering change, was introduced and developed in Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) landmark book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In it, he traces how conceptual thinking in scientific communities became trapped in the accepted theoretical dogma of the existing paradigm and described the dynamics of changes to the accepted paradigmatic thinking. Kuhn states that paradigmatic change disturbs the inertia of normal understandings of operations. It is not additive to the body of existing knowledge, but rather changes how one views everything about it, and related to it. Paradigmatic change shatters the concept of paradigm-dependent thinking. In this regard, the organizational transition at Carris Reels can be understood as a paradigm-shattering change program.

A similar attempt to understand change borrowing from the psychological archetypes of Carl Jung is made by Hinings and Greenwood (1989). These organizational archetypes are the common understanding and interpretation of the systems and structures of the organizational design. They provide the framework for an overall holistic grasp of the gestalt of existence within the organization. Hinings and Greenwood (1989) make the argument that these organizational design archetypes may have the attributes of a paradigm. They further argue that change to the archetype is an emergent and linear process that requires decoupling of structures and systems from the previous organizational interpretive scheme. Clearly, the Carris Reels change initiative is an archetype transforming and gestalt changing effort requiring substantial transformation to the systems and structures of the organization. I would argue, however, that it is not linear change, but rather demonstrates characteristics associated with complex adaptive systems from the field of complexity theory.

Examining organizations as systems has a long history in the field of organization development. Kenneth Boulding (1956) argued for a general systems theory of understanding organizations and the dynamics within organizations. Katz and Kahn (1966) expand and extend the analysis of organizations as systems. Burns and Stalker (1961) interpret organizations as mechanistic and organic systems, and describe a linear progression from one state to the other along a transformational continuum to avoid organizational entropy. Olson and Eoyang (2001) make the theoretical transition from the concept of organic organizational design to one of considering these designs as complex adaptive systems through the lens of complexity theory from the field of theoretical physics. They argue that chaos/complexity theory, nonlinear dynamics, and most especially the concept of complex adaptive systems are particularly salient in understanding and facilitating organizational change. They argue that the complex adaptive system provides an integrative context for understanding the emergent dynamics in a changing organization. Ollhoff and Walcheski (2002, p. 86) define a complex adaptive system as “ . . . an interconnected group of systems that organize and change without the direction of a central authority figure. They organize and change to be a better fit with the environment.” Olson and Eoyang (2001) regard complex adaptive systems as the ultimate representation of an organic organizational design. Brown (2008) and Valente (2010) examine this theoretical approach in change management programs within organizations. Once the initial decision was taken by Bill Carris at Carris Reels to move to employee ownership and governance, the change management programs can be viewed from the lens of a complex adaptive system. More generally, the Carris change program may be understood as an integrative synthesis of a paradigm shattering, archetype transforming example of a complex adaptive systems change.

Discussion

Conger (1991) has stated that the language of leadership is the critical link in galvanizing the commitment of the rank and file of the organization in the strategic vision articulated by the leader. As can be seen in the case study under examination, Carris’ use of florid and inspirational language was instrumental in motivating the organization members to go on the journey with him to employee development and empowerment. Bennis and Nanus (1985) report four strategies for successfully empowering followership: vision, creating meaning in the vision through communication, trust, and deployment of self. Carris energized the pursuit of the strategic plan through richly communicating the vision of employee ownership and governance, working hard to build an organizational culture of trust, and to be a visible leader who shared his leadership with his organizational membership.

Examined carefully, we can see Carris’ viewing himself as a servant leader (and demonstrating that credibly to the membership of the organization), the creation of a culture of trust and community over the years, as the antecedents of this organizational change effort. Moderating variables included the need to establish an extensive training program so that the organizational members were ready to lead as the program progressed, and the fact that the financial situation in the economy slowed the transfer of leadership and governance as the effort went forward. Clearly, the outcome of this initiative to empower organizational members with ownership and governance of what once was a sole proprietorship entrepreneurial effort was the final transfer of the company to the employees. The completion of this transfer marked the movement of the organization from a “heroic” entrepreneurial leader, to a shared leadership state.

Theory and Practice

Everett Hughes (1951, p. 313) has said “ . . . man’s work is one of the more important parts of his social identity, of his self; indeed of his fate in the one life he has to live.” Many sociologists have discussed the centrality of work in the defining of self and the finding of meaning in life for the worker (see, e.g., Braude, 1975). Work, and the experience of work, is fundamental to understanding the human experience and ultimately the human condition. Yet United States labor history is replete with examples of how manufacturing workers have been treated as a commodity. Companies have engaged in mass layoffs when it was in the company’s short-term economic interest to do so. As a result, loyalty has eroded and the psychological contract of mutual commitment between worker and company has been broken. Thus, terms such as career resilience and career self-reliance have become de rigueur.

Pfeffer (1998, p. 162) has said “In the relatively recent past, employers both valued and rewarded employee loyalty. Today, downsizing, outsourcing, and the externalization of employment, the use of contingent arrangements, reign supreme.” In fact, ubiquitous risk and ontological insecurity has been interjected in the experience of work. Because of this risk and ontological insecurity permeates all aspects of life, it creates an ongoing and widespread existential anxiety for workers (on this, see Brown, 1996, 2000, 2005).

This is not the case at Carris Reels. Workers now control their own futures. Their own efforts will determine the security of their futures. The initiative at Carris Reels not only has given them a voice in the management of their company but provides them with the human dignity that all workers should receive. Many years ago, Bill Carris stated the purpose of the employee ownership initiative was to “improve the quality of life for our growing corporate community” to “change a job, a workplace, a company, to a vocation, an extended family, a community” (Carris Financial Corporation, 1997). At the root of this was Bill Carris’ vision “to contribute toward effecting a change in the inequities and unfairness with which our society deals its cards” (Carris, 1994, p. 7). The bottom line of this effort is to establish “ . . . a right to share wealth, to manage our daily work, to ultimately be in control of our lives” (Carris, 1994, p. 7).

Clearly the implications of the Carris strategic initiative are great for the design of work, the design of ESOPs, the realization of employee voice programs, and for the interjection of humanity and dignity into the work relationship.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful for a research sabbatical from the Marist College School of Management during which some of the work presented herein was accomplished.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article

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