Time to put EO at the heart of the economy: Professor Joseph Blasi delivers the 2025 Robert Oakeshott Lecture
Making employee ownership a central cog in UK and US economies requires further understanding of its great benefits among lenders, governments and educators. This was the message from Professor Joseph Blasi, Director Emeritus at the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing, Rutgers University and Fellow of Kellogg College at Oxford University, as he delivered the 2025 Robert Oakeshott Lecture at Bayes Business School.
The annual Lecture was established by the Employee Ownership Association (eoa) to honour its founder, Robert Oakeshott. It is a platform to share thought leadership, build community, and explore the latest major issues facing the employee ownership. Previous speakers include the Rt Hon Nick Clegg, former Deputy Prime Minister, and Sir Charlie Mayfield, former Chairman of the John Lewis Partnership.
Employee ownership, where shares in a business are transferred to its workers rather than being passed down the family or sold to third parties, is rising in popularity. More than 250,000 UK workers own stakes in their employer across 3,000 businesses, and this is growing at a rate of around 10 new businesses each week.
In his talk, titled ‘Time to put EO at the heart of the economy’, Professor Blasi drew on his research of employee-owned companies to explore their benefits with links to heightened workplace motivation and productivity, and strengthened economies. He also outlined key barriers that are currently preventing them from becoming dominant entities and driving economies forward – using data from the United Kingdom and United States.
Professor Blasi outlined three central pillars for growing employee ownership as attracting credit from banks, influencing government policies to provide financial and non-financial incentives, and embedding teaching of employee ownership models into business school curricula. Families, he said, should not be asked to “act like banks”, while banks themselves needed separate divisions to provide credit to employee share ownership plans and Employee Ownership Trusts (EOTS).
Following the lecture, Professor Blasi answered questions from an audience of academics, practitioners and employee ownership members – from how to engage more students in employee ownership education, to influencing lenders to work with employees and helping low-income workers have more say.
Dr Aneesh Banerjee, Reader in Management at Bayes, said:
“Choosing an employee ownership model carries many benefits for both owners and employees, and is gaining popularity as a way of responsible ownership, maintaining core organisational values while rewarding staff for their service.
“However, as Professor Blasi outlined to us, more needs to be done to overcome the financial and logistical hurdles in the transition to EO”.
“We are delighted to host the annual Robert Oakeshott Lecture here at Bayes, and thank Professor Blasi for delivering such an insightful and empowering talk.”
On delivering the lecture, Professor Blasi said:
“Companies perform better when workers are provided opportunities for ownership and responsible participation in solving company problems, both socially and financially. Making possible an employee’s voice in decision-making offers a practical pathway to better productivity, fairness, and dignity for people across sectors – but, further still, provides the foundations of economic resilience.
“While the theoretical advantages are irrefutable, we must translate common findings of employee-ownership characteristics into policy and practice, so that more workplaces can reap the benefits and more workers can experience the advantages.
“Having taken great inspiration from his work, it was an honour to deliver this year’s Robert Oakeshott Lecture. My thanks go to eoa, Arup and Bayes Business School for inviting me to present the case for broader support of employee ownership.”
Professor Blasi is author of The Citizen's Share: Reducing Inequality in the 21st Century (Yale University Press 2013).
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