Joseph R. Blasi

Joseph Blasi is the J. Robert Beyster Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University. He is an economic sociologist and teaches the undergraduate and graduate courses on corporate governance. His work includes economic sociology, the social and economic history, and public policy, particularly focused on the issue of capital shares, namely, broad-based employee stock ownership, profit sharing, gain sharing, and stock options in corporations, in countries, in industries, and regions, for example, with a recent study of Silicon Valley and work on different historical periods of American history. He is currently a Visiting Associate at the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study. He also serves as a Senior Fellow of The Aspen Institute.

He has written thirteen books including The Citizen’s Share: Reducing Inequality in the 21^st Century (Yale University Press, 2013, with Richard Freeman and Douglas Kruse), Shared Capitalism at Work (University of Chicago Press, 2010, with Douglas Kruse and Richard Freeman), In The Company of Owners (Basic Books, 2003, with Douglas Kruse and Aaron Bernstein), The New Owners (HarperCollins, 1991, with Douglas Kruse), and Employee Ownership (Harper and Row, 1988), A Working Nation (Russell Sage Foundation, 2000, with various co-authors). His articles have appeared in the The British Journal of Industrial Relations, Industrial Relations, and the Industrial and Labor Relations Review, among others.

A member of the Department of Human Resource Management and the Department of Labor Studies and Employment Relations at Rutgers since 1989, he worked for many years in the University Senate, serving as a member of its executive committee. He has been a Research Associate in Labor Studies at the National Bureau of Economic Research, the William D. Loughlin Member at the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey from 2007-2008 and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Member at the School of Social Science of the Institute from 1995-1996, as well as a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Social Organization at Princeton University, a Visiting Professor at the Department of Sociology at Princeton University, and a Visiting Professor at the Yale School of Management, and a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Business School.  

He received the Lady Davis Fellowship from Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Haifa and was for many years a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard University. Early in his career he served as a Legislative Assistant in the United States House of Representatives. Blasi received his doctorate from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.

Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing

Download George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton: An Early Case of Shared Capitalism in American History, The Cod Fishery

Download the Main Street Employee Ownership Act Summary

Download the Senators' Letter 2018 Omnibus Appropriations Bill