Employee-owned businesses’ responses during the pandemic : economic, non-economic goal and democratic resilience and their link to ownership, control and benefit

Abstract

Theoretically informed by the degeneration thesis and explored through the lens of Birchall’s tripartite concept of ownership, control and benefit, this paper investigates the resilience of employee-owned businesses during the pandemic. The originality of this paper lies in the novel incorporation of hybrid EOBs, disbenefit (in the form of debt burden), and length of employee ownership to Birchall’s model. Our findings indicate that firms with longer-standing employee ownership are characterised by lower levels of debt burden and tend to exhibit better economic resilience. Higher levels of ownership, on the other hand, are strongly and positively linked to both non-economic and democratic resilience, but there is no significant association between level of ownership and economic resilience. Taken together, our findings provide contemporary empirical evidence that supports Birchall’s assertion that employee ownership has “the potential to transform the meaning of ‘economic’ to include the social” (2012a: 70), but under certain conditions, suggesting important lessons for rebuilding more inclusive economies.