William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte Book Prize Winner
Ownership: Reinventing Capitalism, Companies, and Who Owns What by Corey Rosen and John Case (Berrett-Koehler Publishers)
The book begins from the premise that “ownership matters.” Ownership by a few means benefits for a few, but by spreading ownership around, its benefits are shared broadly. Rosen and Case explain how employee ownership originated, how it works now, and how to expand it in order to build a more equitable society.
Books Recognized with Honorable Mentions
Common Wealth Dividends: History and Theory (Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee) by Brent Ranalli (The Cadmus Group) explores the concept and history of common wealth dividends, universal cash payments funded by fees on the private use of common resources, an idea that starts from the moral intuition that some things, like land and natural resources, ought to be considered our common heritage.
The People's Hotel: Working for Justice in Argentina by Katherine Sobering (University of North Texas) tells the story of Hotel Bauen’s transformation from a privately-owned hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to a worker-owned cooperative in the midst of the country’s 2001 economic crisis.
Working Democracies: Managing Inequality in Worker Cooperatives by Joan S. Meyers (California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo) focuses on two worker cooperatives in business since the 1970s to explore the interconnections between organizational structure and organizational culture under conditions of worker control.
The prize is named for the late William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte, who co-authored a seminal book about MONDRAGON, a Spanish conglomerate composed of worker cooperatives. This prize alternates annually with the prize named for Joyce Rothschild, Professor Emerita at Virginia Tech, a leading sociologist in the field of organizational democracy. Both prizes recognize works that advance understanding of economic democracy.
