Ownership and Confusion in Employee‐Owned Firms: An Exploration of the EOT Model

ABSTRACT Based on interviews with employees in UK employee ownership trusts (EOTs), this article interrogates understandings of ‘ownership’ and explores confusion, tensions and frustrations in the lived experience of ownership stemming from employees' dual status as employees and owners. Employees assume that ownership brings various rights, but these often conflict with management understandings, the perspectives of other employees and the limited rights legally embedded in the EOT model. This emphasises the tensions between employee‐owners' legal status as beneficiaries and aspects of their ownership status that are dependent on norms and discourse. Relationships are crucial in developing shared understandings of ownership within the internal ‘community’ of employee‐owners. By showing how relationships shape such understandings and how ownership ‘works’ in practice, the study illuminates how conceptualisations of ownership impact the functioning of EOT firms.