Teaching faculty, researchers, and the public can access the Curriculum Library for Employee Ownership (CLEO)
by Adria Scharf
Over the years, scholars have generated an enormous amount of evidence suggesting that employee ownership can strengthen firm performance, firm survival, and job stability, and improve employee economic well-being. Rutgers University’s School of Management and Labor Relations’ Curriculum Library for Employee Ownership (CLEO) now organizes and makes this large body of research-informed information accessible to researchers, teaching faculty, and the public.
CLEO is an online library of scholarly research and teaching materials on employee share ownership, featuring more than 600 resources—including company case studies, links to research articles, and policy reports. Designed to help college professors teach about employee ownership in their classes, this digital library is freely available to anyone interested in employee share ownership in its many forms.
CLEO is an online library of scholarly research and teaching materials on employee share ownership, featuring more than 600 resources.
The site was redesigned in 2020 to make it easy to navigate and use. The home page features “CLEO Collections,” where visitors can access free full-text downloadable case studies, policy reports, syllabi and videos. For users looking for something specific, say for example, “a strategy case study on an ESOP company in the retail sector” or “journal articles on worker cooperatives in Africa,” an advanced search feature allows visitors to select multiple search criteria, including the subject, format, publication date, region, and industry. This allows users to home in on the exact types of materials they need.
“I include sharing ownership and participation at work in every general management, social responsibility, and social enterprises course that I teach,” said Daphne Berry, associate professor of management at the Barney School of Business at the University of Hartford, who uses CLEO for teaching materials. “Decision making, teamwork, motivation, labor relations, organizational design, and stakeholders’ interests are a few of the topics that lend themselves to discussions of how shared ownership can positively influence company productivity, employee engagement, and shared responsibility.”
A new feature on the site, launched in February 2021, is the “Employee Ownership Speakers Bureau,” a list of experienced CEOs and experts who can be scheduled to speak to university classes about sharing ownership with employees.
Launched in 2008 by the Beyster Foundation for Enterprise Development, the Employee Ownership Foundation, and the Aspen Institute, CLEO moved to Rutgers in 2016 and continues to grow. More than 150 new resources were added to the site in the past year, and visits to the site have more than tripled since CLEO was redesigned last spring. CLEO is housed within the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations.
Its growing collection is available at https://cleo.rutgers.edu. Researchers are also invited to share materials for posting, which can be submitted to Julie Peters at jpeters@smlr.rutgers.edu (please include a brief summary or abstract).
Adria Scharf, PhD, is a Beyster Fellow and Director of the Curriculum Library for Employee Ownership at the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers University’s School of Management and Labor Relations. Over the course of 2021, she will be contributing regular columns covering new research in the employee ownership field to Employee Ownership News.
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