SMLR Info

The Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing seeks nominations for the 2025 William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte Book Prize. Books that have been published between 2021 and 2024 are eligible for nomination. Authors are encouraged to self-nominate. 

The award is intended to honor a book (or edited volume) that makes a significant contribution to the advancement of economic democracy. That advancement could be to our theoretical understanding, to research, or to the real-world development of employee share ownership, workers’ cooperative ownership, profit sharing, or any newly emergent form of workers’ ownership and/or democratic governance in the economic sphere.

The book must have appeared in print by an independent publisher either as a hard cover or paperback (or both) in these years. Books that have only appeared digitally are not eligible.  Note that a book will only be considered if an approved PDF of the book is submitted as part of the nomination process. The 2025 prize will be awarded in January 2025. The final awardee(s) will receive a cash prize and be asked to give a presentation about their book at an Institute conference.

Please submit your nomination(s) via this link by Friday, September 6, 2024, at 11:59pm. 

This is our recommended method for submitting nominations. If you prefer, you may instead email your nomination to BOTH Adria Scharf (adria.scharf@rutgers.edu) and Douglas Kruse (dkruse@smlr.rutgers.edu) by that date.

---

A perpetual endowment in support of the book prizes has been established at Rutgers University’s School of Management and Labor Relations. In alternate years, the book prize will honor William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte and then Joyce Rothschild.    

Nominators will receive a confirmation of their nomination and nominated authors will be notified of their nomination. Nominators will be required to submit a PDF of the book in order to be considered for the prize.  

---

Previous Book Prize Winners 

---

2024 Joyce Rothschild Book Prize

Shared Winner: Cooperatives at Work by George Cheney, Matt Noyes, Emi Do, Joseba Azkarraga, Marcelo Vieta, and Charlie Michel

Shared Winner: Own This!: How Platform Cooperatives Help Workers Build a Democratic Internet by R. Trebor Scholz

Honorable Mention: Co-operative Struggles: Work Conflicts in Argentina’s New Worker Co-operatives by Denise Kasparian

Honorable Mention: Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory by Bernard E. Harcourt

Honorable Mention: Create Amazing: Turning Your Employees into Owners for Explosive Growth by Greg Graves

Honorable Mention: Humanity @ Work & Life: Global Diffusion of the Mondragon Cooperative Ecosystem Experience by Christina A. Clamp and Michael A. Peck

---

2023 William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte Book Prize

Winner: Ownership: Reinventing Capitalism, Companies, and Who Owns What by Corey Rosen and John Case  

Honorable Mention: Common Wealth Dividends: History and Theory (Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee) by Brent Ranalli  

Honorable Mention: The People's Hotel: Working for Justice in Argentina by Katherine Sobering  

Honorable Mention:  Working Democracies: Managing Inequality in Worker Cooperatives by Joan S. Meyers  

---

2022 Joyce Rothschild Book Prize  

Winner: Organizational Imaginaries: Tempering Capitalism and Tending to Communities through Cooperatives and Collectivist Democracy, edited by Katherine K. Chen & Victor Tan Chen

Honorable Mention: The Labor-Managed Firm: Theoretical Foundations by Gregory K. Dow

Honorable Mention: Neo-Abolitionism: Abolishing Human Rentals in Favor of Workplace Democracy by David Ellerman

Honorable Mention: Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina: Contesting Neo-Liberalism by Occupying Companies, Creating Cooperatives, and Recuperating Autogestión by Marcelo Vieta

---

2021 William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte Book Prize  

Winner: Shared Entrepreneurship: A Path to Engaged Employee Ownership, edited by Frank Shipper

Honorable Mention: Firms as Political Entities: Saving Democracy through Economic Bicameralism by Isabelle Ferreras

Honorable Mention: The Making of a Democratic Economy: How to Build Prosperity for the Many, Not the Few by Marjorie Kelly and Ted Howard

---

Submit your nomination(s) via this link by Friday, September 6, 2024.