Perdue School Faculty Publish in 'Organizational Dynamics'

SALISBURY, MD---Faculty from Salisbury University’s Franklin P. Perdue School of Business and other institutions recently published the article “Mondragon’s Amorphous Network Structure: Making the Whole Truly Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts” in the journal Organizational Dynamics.

Authors included Drs. Olivier Roche, associate dean of the Perdue School, Fred Freundlich of Mondragon Unibertsitatea, Charles Manz of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Frank Shipper, Perdue School professor of management.

The article focused on the globalization process of the world’s largest integrated cooperative network, Spain’s Mondragon Corporation. Founded as an employee-owned cooperative by five engineers in 1955, the company originally made stoves and heaters. Today, it employs nearly 75,000 people worldwide as a group of more than 250 cooperatively owned businesses, subsidiaries and affiliated organizations with annual sales of over $17 billion.

In addition to Mondragon, Roche, Shipper and their colleagues have researched extensively the shared governance and ownership management model and its role in many top companies, such as W.L. Gore and Associates, Herman Miller, Equal Exchange, TEOCO (The Employee-Owned Company) and the John Lewis Partnership of the United Kingdom.

Their work is widely recognized. Individuals from over 150 countries have used it. For the past three years, it has been presented at the Business Fights Poverty conference at the University of Oxford, England. It also is presented regularly at the Beyster Institute at the University of California San Diego and at Rutgers University. In 2017, Roche was a presenter at the Eastern Academy of Management in Brisbane, Australia, and Shipper was a keynote speaker at the International Rendanheyi Model Forum in Qingdao, China.

Their research also has been referenced by national media, including MSNBC and The Wall Street Journal, and featured on Rutgers University’s School of Management and Labor Relations’s Curriculum Library for Employee Ownership, the largest global online library on employee ownership.

Multiple grants and awards to continue their work have been received, including Rutgers University’s prestigious Kevin E. Ruble Fellowship.

For more information call 410-543-6030 or visit the SU website at www.salisbury.edu.