8/21/2009 3:02:16 PM By
E.J. Reedy
When I first saw the term "shared capitalism" I was a little puzzled but the more I have looked into the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Shared Capitalism Project the more interesting I found it. Shared capitalism is defined as "employment relations where the pay or wealth of workers is directly tied to workplace or firm performance." Funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation and spanning more than 10 years, this project is just getting to the stage where you will soon see a finished University of Chicago publication. But in the meantime, you can find many of the chapters of this book in near final versions online. According to Joseph Blasi, one of the principals on the project:
The Introduction chapter which you can download at this web site (in the top position) will explain the project in some detail including the theoretical background, what we did, and our main empirical findings. In brief, we surveyed over 40,000 employees in 14 firms and hundreds of separate work sites and established a national random sample of the US working population using the General Social Survey (GSS) with a special shared capitalism set of questions on the 2002, 2006, and now 2010 GSS, as a control group.
In Appendix A, they define some of the terms that are common throughout the book. I thought it appropriate to highlight how innovation outcomes were defined:
- Culture for Innovation: Mean of following items, all measured on a 1-4 scale (1=never or almost never, 2=sometimes, 3=often, 4=always or almost always) "How often do the following things occur in your facility?"
a) “Ideas for developing innovative products and services are put forward”
b) “Meaningful time is invested in testing good ideas for innovative products and
services”
c) “Innovative ideas are carefully considered and fairly evaluated”
d) “Resources are made available to support and develop a good idea that could lead to
an innovative product or service”
e) “People who have an innovative idea receive recognition for it”
f) “People who have an innovative idea receive financial rewards for it”
g) “My ideas for innovative products and services have been taken seriously”
- Innovative Ideas: Mean of following items, all measured on a 1-4 scale (1=not at all, 2=very little, 3=to some extent, 4=to a great extent)
a) “I would be willing to be more involved in efforts to develop innovative products and
services”
b) “I have good ideas for innovative products or services”
c) “I have good ideas for improvements in existing products and services”
8/11/2009 10:28:06 AM By
E.J. Reedy
Alicia Robb, Denny Dennis, and I did a
Professional Development Workshop at the Academy of Management a couple of days ago. Here I am posting the slides from that workshop, which focused on data available for entrepreneurship research, along with notes from my comments at the event, which I had not put into slides.
Alicia Robb, Kauffman Foundation and University of California, Santa Cruz
Denny Dennis, NFIB
E.J. Reedy, Kauffman Foundation
Additionally, at the meeting, hard copies of the
proceedings of the 2007 Kauffman Symposium on Entrepreneurship and Innovation Data were handed out. Additional copies were requested by some but
electronic versions of each paper are available on line. The
2008 proceedings, which focused on ideas for improving data are also available.
And lastly, we highlighted a few ways in which scholars could connect with Kauffman and other scholars in this area. There is this blog,
Data Maven, for tracking data developments. On Facebook, join the
Kauffman Entrepreneurship Scholars group. Subscribe to
entrepreneurship emails from Social Science Research Network. Or participate in
Kauffman's emerging scholars programs.
8/10/2009 3:51:03 PM By
E.J. Reedy
I just got an email from
Tim Sturgeon at MIT which was quite encouraging. First, they have recently received notification from the National Science Foundation (NSF) recommending funding for the 2009 National Organizations Survey. While this is still some time away before researchers could use the data,
Tim and his co-principal investigators presented an overview of some of their plans in
November 2008 at the Kauffman Data Symposium. The issue of whether or not an entrepreneurship sample can be funded, as they propose, remains, and is something which this team is looking to Kauffman for. As such, I remain open to feedback on that portion of the proposal.
But outside of this, I wanted to highlight that apparently data collected in the Globalization Module of the 2008
General Social Survey will soon be available for analysis by application. The data will be posted to
NORC Data Enclave soon. They also have plans to make the National Organization Survey data available for scholarly use after collection. Kauffman sponsored a small
entrepreneurship module in the 2008 GSS, as well, which might be of interest.
3/4/2009 4:32:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
2/20/2009 6:40:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
In 2008, we funded a small module of questions on the General Social Survey (GSS), one of the most used social science research databases in the world. Read the questions from the 2008 survey. We have just received a first draft of the collected data and are under some time constraint in deciding whether to fund a similar set of questions (or possibly different set of questions) for the 2010 GSS. We need your help!
The GSS is transitioning from a cross-section only design to a combined cross-sectional and panel design. In 2008 the GSS had a new cross-section with 2,023 cases and also 1,538 reinterviews with 2006 GSS respondents. The initial 1972-2008 data file with the new 2008 cross-section will be available the week of February 23, 2009. The attached file has the unweighted tabulations from the entrepreneurship variables. It shows about ten percent of their household sample reported that they were in the process of trying to start a business and about twelve percent of households reported owning one or more businesses. These questions were also fielded on the panel of 1,538 reinterviews with 2006 GSS respondents. That data will be available in a month or two.
Do you want a copy of the preliminary cross-sectional file? Unfortunately because of the stage of the process, I can't post that openly, but request for that file can be made directly to me by email.
Additionally, Tom Smith, the Principal Investigator for the GSS, has written a paper for the 2008 Kauffman Data Symposium which outlines the proposed direction for 2010 GSS questions. Read the paper. Unfortunately, when Tom wrote the paper he didn't have the data back from the 2008 GSS.
I will be reviewing and contemplating all of this over the coming months, having just received things this morning. As such, I throw it open to others to comment on this effort and whether it bears doing again as Tom proposes in his paper or some modified manner. This data has great potential for the research community but like all public-use data, that does not come without it's difficulties in identifying what to measure and how. In the case of the 2008 GSS questions, we were provided some very good input from Patricia Greene (and a few others she coordinated with) and borrowed very heavily from questions used in the Panel Study on Entrepreneurial Dynamics, but we need a wider set of input before we can determine our future direction with this project.
Read the Early Tabular Results - GSS.pdf (13.28 kb)
GSS Questions SectionE.pdf (13.04 kb)