Noting a paucity of research on the subject, this article attempts to explore the effects of employee ownership, concentrating on possible relationships between ownership and such variables as organizational identification, employee job attitudes, and organizational performance, and on identifying variables which may moderate these relationships. After development of a conceptual framework, empirical data obtained from study of a trucking company recently purchased by most of its employees are presented and discussed. These data support the plausibility of many of the hypothesized relationships, but do not permit strong causal inferences. Although the author tentatively concludes that employee ownership appears to have improved employee attitudes and organizational performance in this case, he stresses that much further research, in a variety of settings, specifically designed to permit causal testing of the propositions suggested here, is badly needed before firm conclusions can be drawn.

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This longitudinal analysis of employment in 510 Canadian firms over the period 1980 to 1985 provides evidence that union firms in both the manufacturing and nonmanufacturing sectors experienced substantially slower employment growth than comparable nonunion firms. Controlling for industry sector, firm size, and firm age, the author finds that within the manufacturing sector, union firms grew 3.7% more slowly per year than nonunion firms, and within the nonmanufacturing sector, union firms grew 3.9% more slowly than nonunion firms. Small firms in both sectors, however, appear to have escaped any negative union effect on employment growth. Of the control variables, firm age appears to be much more important than firm size in explaining employment growth.The past decade or so has witnessed a dramatic surge of interest in and research on the impact of unions on various aspects of company performance, such as productivity and profitability. Surprisingly, however, relatively few empirical studies have examined the impact of unionization on employment growth within established firms, despite the obvious importance of this issue,

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