Joseph Blasi

Joseph R. Blasi is the J. Robert Beyster Distinguished Professor of Management & Global Business at the Rutgers Business School - Newark & New Brunswick (by joint appointment). His home department at Rutgers is the Department of Human Resource Management in the School of Management and Labor Relations where he also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Labor Studies and Employment Relations. His scholarship focuses on the economic sociology of the corporation, corporate governance, and the sociology of work with particular focus on forms of equity and profit and gain sharing by employees at all levels in corporations from small businesses to large stock market companies and the policy analysis of these practices in the Federal and state governments. He serves as the Director of the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing. Blasi teaches courses on corporate governance and equity and profit shares. His research has examined these subjects in companies of all sizes, in different countries, in different industries (such as high tech firms, steel, retail organizations, and airlines, among others), and in different formats, from Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) to broad-based stock options in Silicon Valley to different worker cooperatives in the Mondragon area of Spain’s Basque Region, Israel, and the United States. His work has especially focused on the human resource and employment practices that constitute the most supportive corporate culture for different forms of employee shares. He is the author or co-author of thirteen books including The Citizen’s Share: Reducing Inequality in the 21st Century (Yale University Press), Shared Capitalism at Work: Employee Ownership, Profit and Gain Sharing, and Broad-Based Stock Options (University of Chicago Press), In the Company of Owners (Basic Books), A Working Nation: Workers, Work, and Government in the New Economy (Russell Sage Foundation), Stock Options, Organizational Performance and Organizational Change (National Center for Employee Ownership), The New Owners: The Mass Emergence of Employee Ownership in Public Companies and What It Means to American Business (HarperCollins), Employee Ownership: Revolution or Ripoff? (Harper and Row – Ballinger Books), Taking Stock: Employee Ownership at Work (Harper and Row), and the Oxford Handbook of Mutual, Co-operative and Employee-Owned Businesses (Oxford University Press). His articles have appeared in the Annals of Operations Research, Labor Economics, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Industrial Relations, the British Journal of Industrial Relations, Human Resource Management, the Journal of Participation and Employee Ownership, and in the Working Paper Series of the National Bureau for Economic Research and The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn. He has written policy briefs on shares published by the national think tanks, such as the Center for American Progress and ThirdWay.org His research can be viewed and downloaded on his Google Scholar page.

Joseph has served as a fellow at numerous institutions, a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, a member and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study, a Senior Fellow of the Aspen Institute, a former Research Associate at the National Bureau for Economic Research where he co—directed the Shared Capitalism Research Project funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, a Research Fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn, a former Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Social Organization at Princeton University, and a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Business School . He was the recipient of the Fulbright Fellowship In Israel at the University of Haifa and the Lady Davis Fellowship at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has been a Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University and at the Yale School of Management. From 1977-1980, he entered government service as a Legislative Assistant in the U.S. House of Representatives. He currently serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Participation and Employee Ownership.

Joseph initially studied to be a Jesuit as part of the seminary, the Novitiate of St. Isaac Jogues of the Society of Jesus where he studied Latin, Greek, German, and theology. He holds a B.S. in psychology from the University of Pittsburgh and a doctorate from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. Before coming to Rutgers in 1989, he was a Professor of Management at the School of Business at California Polytechnic State University and, for many years, a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard College. He is a member of the Academy of Management, the American Sociological Association, the American Economic Association, and the Labor and Employment Research Association. Blasi has regularly written on the role of equity and profit shares in American society with op-ed columns in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Fortune Magazine, the Huffington Post, and Time Magazine as well as Internet publications, The Daily Beast, PBS.org, and Salon.com. He has been frequently quoted and interviewed for Bloomberg Radio, Business Week Magazine, CNN, The Economist, Fox Business, the Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, National Public Radio, The New York Times, The Washington Post, among others. He has given two Talks@Google as the guest of Google employees about his books.