Academy of Management Perspectives

Although most of the research and public pressure concerning sustainability has been focused on the effects of business and organizational activity on the physical environment, companies and their management practices profoundly affect the human and social environment as well. This article briefly reviews the literature on the direct and indirect effects of organizations and their decisions about people on human health and mortality. It then considers some possible explanations for why social sustainability has received relatively short shrift in management writing, and outlines a research agenda for investigating the links between social sustainability and organizational effectiveness as well as the role of ideology in understanding the relative neglect of the human factor in sustainability research.

We review William Starbuck and Moshe Farjoun's Organization at the Limit: Lessons from the Columbia Disaster, a book that provides a unique look at a rare empirical phenomenon: the total failure of a high-risk, high-reward organization. The National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA) is a large, elaborate, and mature organization, which operates risky and complex technologies in an environment that emits ambiguous signals. In particular, NASA's space shuttle, Columbia, disintegrated during re-entry, after completing its 16-day scientific research mission. All seven astronauts on board the Space Shuttle were killed. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB, 2003) stated that this disaster was a product of NASA's history, cultural traits, and long-term organizational practices. The multiple contributing factors give rise to eighteen chapters of various observers, interpretations, and evaluation criteria.

This paper examines the structure and direction of developing Asia’s trade over the past two decades. The impacts on developing Asia of the economic slowdown in 2009–2010 in high-income countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which includes the European Union (EU), Japan, and United States (US) are projected through a computable general equilibrium model (CGE) of world trade and production. In addition, the impacts of fiscal stimulus and the rise of protectionist sentiments within developing Asia are examined. The expansion of intraregional trade in Asia reflects the role of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as an assembly point and its reliance on demand from outside the region, the EU and the US in particular. The trade channel is crucial in transmitting economic distress from the OECD countries to developing Asia. The projection shows that developing Asia will continue to suffer from demand decline in OECD countries, with the PRC and India being the most impacted. Though Southeast Asia faces reduced exports to the OECD countries, its exports are reduced significantly to other Asian exporters, demonstrating the indirect trade linkages that now exist in the global economy. Fiscal stimulus from the largest economies (including PRC, EU, Japan, and US) could help boost trade and gross domestic product growth in developing Asia but it is not projected to offset entirely the negative impact from the global economic downturn. Protectionism has a negative impact on the countries and regions that take that course. Southeast Asia would be the most impacted by protectionism. If Southeast Asian countries were to raise their applied tariffs to the maximum most-favored nation bound rates under the World Trade Organization, the impact would be negative on real gross domestic product. Heavy manufactures followed by light manufactures, electronics, and textiles are most impacted.

This essay was written in response to the theme of this year's Academy of Management meeting, "Green Management Matters." I assert that firms should adopt "green management" practices only if such activities complement the organization's business- and corporate-level strategies and ultimately enhance profitability or shareholder wealth. To illustrate this I outline an economic/strategic perspective on green management practices, focusing on the strategic benefits and competitive dynamics associated with this activity. I also identify specific tactics firms can employ to achieve such strategic goals as well as the functional areas affected by these decisions.

nullThis paper employs a qualitative method to analyze a successful university spinoff venture that originates from research conducted in a humanities discipline. We offer insight into 1) how socio-spatial contexts may be structured to better evaluate the entrepreneurial facilitation process and 2) why academic entrepreneurship in the social sciences and humanities may differ from the hard sciences. Our findings illustrate the importance of bridging innovation using twin skills to balance research and commercial goals, the need for codifying knowledge capacities and creating new or changing existing institutional structures to legitimize and facilitate entrepreneurial activity. The research also demonstrates the great value in auto-ethnographic techniques to bring fresh insight to the study of entrepreneurship. Directions for future research are offered.

The authors focuses on research by Florian Pichler and Claire Wallace into whether individual and workforce factors are responsible for differences in job satisfaction across European Union countries or whether institutional factors were also at work. The main factors affecting job satisfaction were occupational class and type of employment contract so that people in professional and managerial jobs were more satisfied than employees performing manual work. Institutional factors, such as average wages, helped explain the impact of individual and workforce composition differences across countries.

The authors discuss research by Nihat Aktas and others concerning why chief executive officers (CEO) create less value with successive acquisitions. Although observers may think that CEO hubris or overconfidence is to blame, the study by Aktas suggests that CEOs are able to correctly assess expected value. However, with successive acquisitions, they improve their ability to manage the risks that accompany the integration of acquisitions. Therefore, they may be willing to pay a higher price for acquisitions.

For the last decade we have been using double-blind survey techniques and randomized sampling to construct management data on over 10,000 organizations across twenty countries. On average, we find that in manufacturing American, Japanese, and German firms are the best managed. Firms in developing countries, such as Brazil, China and India tend to be poorly managed. American retail firms and hospitals are also well managed by international standards, although American schools are worse managed than those in several other developed countries. We also find substantial variation in management practices across organizations in every country and every sector, mirroring the heterogeneity in the spread of performance in these sectors. One factor linked to this variation is ownership. Government, family, and founder owned firms are usually poorly managed, while multinational, dispersed shareholder and private-equity owned firms are typically well managed. Stronger product market competition and higher worker skills are associated with better management practices. Less regulated labor markets are associated with improvements in incentive management practices such as performance based promotion.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Asked to describe the essence of the advantage that a leading investment bank enjoyed, a senior executive offered the comment quoted above on his competitor's superior capacity for internal cooperation. As his comment reflects, the art of building and sustaining collaborative relationships is a fundamental prerequisite for competitive success in many industries. Major initiatives aimed at reengineering, outsourcing, and global supply chain management all seek to create value through a process of dismantling traditional barriers between functions and firms and have been much discussed. Collaboration across lines of business-based divisions has been strangely underrepresented in these discussions; yet it can have profound strategic significance in particular industry contexts. This article explores what those contexts look like, the value that collaborative approaches contribute, and the practices characterizing a set of high performing firms that have succeeded based upon their capacity to achieve collaborative outcomes. The article begins by linking collaboration with current thinking in the field of strategy about competitive advantage.

This article discusses the principles that organizations employ when allocating rewards, such as pay raises to employees. Because appropriate allocation of rewards may enhance employee motivation and contribute to the realization of corporate goals and objectives, it is an increasingly important tool. Three rubrics for reward allocation are equity, which is based on performance, equality, which is based upon an equal distribution across the workforce, and need, which is based on the employee's personal need.

The article focuses on a study by social researcher Ola Sjoberg that determined that governance structures have a major impact on the way in which corporate earnings are distributed. The authors discusses alternative explanations for income inequality. They suggest that the effects of the U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley Act on income inequality be studied. The authors argue that the difference between governance of U.S. private and public firms as well as governance structures in Asian nations should be analyzed. They suggest that the implications for firm performance be investigated.

Behavioral strategies are a potentially promising microfoundation of management research. Strategies involving processes of momentum, feedback, inference, and anticipation are already being investigated by organizational scholars, and evidence is mounting for each one. They are interesting because they can be seen as expressions of the level of rationality in organizational action, taking the organization as a stylized decision maker, and they also serve as windows into decision making processes and sources of puzzles that can guide direct investigation of decision making processes. The combination of evidence, consequential, and generative power for future research argue for giving behavioral strategies a role in the microfoundations of management theory.

Everyone knows that good people management enhances corporate performance. Not so obvious is that successful people strategies are three-dimensional, each dimension requiring an equal amount of attention. Based on our ten-year study within seven different organizations, we propose a three-dimensional model that executives can use to determine the current state of their people strategies along the three dimensions, using a short questionnaire to aid in the diagnosis. Armed with this information, executives will then be able to address any apparent shortcomings along the three dimensions. A key factor to emerge is that the emphasis needs to be as much on making it happen in the day-to-day life of the organization as on developing good people strategies in the first place.

Worldwide, women are entering the workforce in greater numbers than ever before. No longer is the "typical worker" a man whose wife stays home to care for the children so that he can focus on his career. In the United States alone, more than half of all women are employed today. In the years ahead, half of the people entering the workforce are expected to be female.

We propose that the study of organization design has been unduly neglected in recent years despite its critical importance for organizational performance. We point to the daunting complexity of the subject matter as a pivotal reason why researchers have turned to other questions. In this paper, we argue that the complexity of design can be successfully approached through the conjoint application of theories from strategic management and organization theory to types of organizations. We elaborate on this approach using transnational professional service firms as an illustrative example.

Despite differences of opinion about the efficacy of the concept of corporate social responsibility there is a general consensus amongst academics, policy makers and practitioners that corporations operate with social sanction that requires that they operate within the norms and mores of the societies in which they exist. In this article, I argue that the notion of a socially responsible corporation is potentially an oxymoron because of the naturally conflicted nature of the corporation. This has profound implications for our understanding of corporate social responsibility, what we view as the relevant issues relating to it and how we investigate its role and impact.

Private equity is best understood not as a financing method but as a governance structure, one that emphasizes strong performance incentives, rules over discretion, and a strong alignment between ownership and management. Briefly, private equity governance makes owners into active managers and makes managers behave like owners. As such, private equity is often regarded as a more “entrepreneurial” form of governance than that associated with the publicly traded corporation. We argue for a balanced view in which private equity is best regarded as a governance structure that, like all forms of organization, has benefits and costs that vary according to circumstances. Building on the “judgment-based” view of entrepreneurship, we note that managers of privately held firms, as owners, exercise a strong degree of entrepreneurial judgment over the use of assets, unlike salaried executives of publicly held companies. At the same time, however, privately held firms are often constrained from pursuing potentially attractive profit opportunities by the nature of their debt obligations. Private equity is not a panacea, and buyouts do not necessarily generate the typical outward markers of innovation such as patents, employment growth, and the establishment of new enterprises.

‘Career’, describing an individual’s series of work activities, stems from the Latin carrara for a carriage traveling along a road. The latest stage in the journey of the career discipline and its literature is a proliferation of handbooks and collected readings and the growing wealth of material accessible through on-line initiatives such as Google Scholar, Wikipedia and soon Citizendium, which enable researchers to connect quickly with key definitions and works. Despite, or perhaps because of, this explosion in knowledge and research, there is a need for easy access to concise and current reviews by recognized experts in the career field. This task has been enthusiastically undertaken by Jeff Greenhaus and Gerry Callanan and their team of six editors (Nancy Betz, Tim Hall, Kerr Inkson, Phyllis Moen, Mark Savickas and Rosalie Tung) and some 300 authors who have contributed over 400 entries in two Encyclopedia of Career Development volumes. The late John Kenneth Galbraith claimed there are three types of encyclopedia readers – those who use them merely to look things up, those who seek to acquaint themselves with a subject to be able to have conversations about it, and those who use them to learn things. All three users will find value in this substantial work.

Most leadership training that is being conducted in corporate offsites is ill-advised. I make this bold statement because the intent of most of this training is to put leadership into people such that they can transform themselves and then their organizations upon their return. In this article, I shall address why the latter process is unlikely to succeed and what alternatives exist that can more effectively put leadership directly into the organization, where it belongs.

Buyouts, especially leveraged buyouts, have been perceived historically as on organizational efficiency tool to streamline organizational processes, reduce workforces, and decrease unit costs. This efficiency approach has been especially useful with mature firms, where the structure of debt and limits to managerial spending decrease the downside risk and possible future failure of the firm. This article illustrates how buyouts can also create entrepreneurial opportunities and allow upside growth. In particular, it focuses on understanding the aspects and circumstances of the entrepreneurial mindsets of managers who seek upside growth through buyouts. These entrepreneurial mentalists provide a wider view of buyouts as a vehicle for renewal the frequently leads to revitalization and strategic innovation. This article provides insights for entrepreneurs, managers, and financiers by articulating 4 categories of buyout opportunity - efficiency, revitalization, entrepreneurial, and failure buyouts. The conditions under which each may be appropriate, including the governance and financial incentives are specified.

Medical error has reached epidemic proportions, and researchers have developed insufficiently sophisticated models of safety culture to match the complexity of the challenge of safety in health care. This has left providers and researchers with an inadequate conceptual toolkit for improving safety. To rectify the resulting crisis we consolidate fragments of management research into a comprehensive and integrative framework of how patient safety is produced and sustained through safety culture. Safety culture involves actions that single out and focus safety-relevant premises and cultural practices that reduce harm. This entails (a) enabling, which consolidates the premises for a safety culture; (b) enacting, which translates consolidated premises into concrete practices that prioritize safety; and (c) elaborating, which enlarges and refines the consolidation and translation. We close by discussing the implications of our framework for future research on key issues such as efficiency-safety trade-offs, interactions among components of the framework and feedback loops.

Emotions in workplace settings and emotional intelligence are hot topics in management today. Leading business journals such as Fortune and Harvard Business Review have featured articles on emotional intelligence. But there is more to emotions in the workplace than just emotional intelligence. The aim of this article is to acquaint managers with intriguing new research that examines both emotional intelligence and the broader issue of emotion, which has been shown to play a powerful role in workplace settings. We show that this research has a strong potential for practical application in organizations within many broad human-resource functions such as selection, performance management, and training, as well as implications for more narrow domains like customer service. We conclude that the study of emotions in organizational settings has provided new and important insights into the way in which people in organizations behave, and we offer advice for managers to enable them to develop and to maintain a positive emotional climate in their organizations.

The article presents a review of the book "The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value With Customers," by C. K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy

The article discusses research into how companies can effectively reveal their business strategies to investors in initial public offerings (IPOs). A study by researcher Gao Hongzhi and his associates that compared prospectuses for IPOs of companies in the biotechnology industry suggested that information on business strategy can serve as a market indicator to guide investors and reduce information asymmetry behind stock transactions. The methods to counter problems related to technology, administration and entrepreneurship were used to categorize firms as prospectors, which can adapt to market changes, or defenders, which require centralization and a stable market.

In 2007, for the first time in recent history, the volume of mergers and acquisitions by European companies surpassed that of their U.S. counterparts. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the trends and drivers of this surge in M&A activity in the European Union. It reviews the role of the European Commission in fostering a level playing field for takeover activity and the key characteristics of M&A deals in Europe. Despite evidence of significant progress toward the development of a homogeneous market for M&As, important differences still hold among European countries both in the rules and in the patterns that M&A activity takes. The analysis suggests that this dissimilarity between Europe and the U.S. is not solely linked to the existence of a harmonized market but rather arises from unique institutional characteristics ingrained in the corporate structure of companies, which differ among European countries. This raises questions about the generalizability of current research on North American M&As to the European context.

By integrating organizational and institutional theories, this paper develops a contingency approach to executive remuneration and assesses its effectiveness in different organizational and institutional contexts. Most of the executive remuneration research focuses on the principal-agent framework and assumes a universal link between executive incentives and performance outcomes. We suggest a framework that examines executive compensation in terms of its organizational contexts and potential complementarities/ substitution effects between different corporate governance practices at both the firm and national levels. We also discuss the implications for different approaches to executive compensation policy such as "soft law" and "hard law."

In the wake of the recent financial crisis, US executive compensation has, once again, come under fire from regulators, politicians, the financial press, the general public, and some academics. Although the critiques are varied, many identify the level of pay and performance-based incentives as two key areas of concern. And, as is often the case in the wake of a crisis, proposals have been put forward to resolve the “problems” with executive pay and incentives. A deficiency with all of these proposals, however, is the failure to articulate a framework for determining the appropriate level of executive incentives. Rather, the proposals simply discuss ways firms or regulators might get executives to hold greater incentives without identifying how one should determine whether or when an executive has enough (or too much) incentives. In this paper, we lay out an economic framework for thinking about how much performance-based incentives an executive should have. In doing this, we emphasize how performance-based incentives are linked to executive pay levels, as well as to the level of executives’ wealth. We also make clear both the benefits and costs of performance-based incentives.

Government corruption is a pervasive element of the international business environment and has damaging effects on governments, firms, and the broader society in which it takes place. Recently publicized scandals in Russia, China, Pakistan, Lesotho, South Africa, Costa Rica, Egypt, and elsewhere underscore the extent of corruption globally, especially in the developing world. Yet, the impact of government corruption on foreign investment has received limited attention. In this article, we examine how multinational firms respond to corruption when investing in foreign markets, especially developing countries. The article begins with a discussion of the direct and indirect costs of corruption to business and provides illustrations of corruption's impact on firms that invest in foreign markets. We employ a framework that incorporates two basic dimensions of government corruption -- pervasiveness and arbitrariness. We then propose five broad strategies that multinationals should consider in responding to corruption and give examples of organizations that use these approaches. Corruption involves costs that firms investing abroad are likely to misjudge or ignore. A clear understanding of corruption's nature creates value for decision makers and allows for a strategic analysis of responses to corruption pressures.

How are job satisfaction and firm value linked? I tackle this long-standing management question using a new methodology from finance. I study the effect on firm-level value, rather than employee-level productivity, to take into account the cost of increasing job satisfaction. To address reverse causality, I measure firm value by using future stock returns, and control for risk, firm characteristics, industry performance, and outliers. Companies listed in the "100 Best Companies to Work For in America" generated 2.3-3.8%/year higher stock returns than their peers from 1984-2011. These results have three main implications. First, consistent with HRM theories, job satisfaction is beneficial for firm value. Second, corporate social responsibility can improve stock returns. Third, the stock market does not fully value intangible assets, and so it may be necessary to shield the manager from short-term stock prices to encourage long-run growth.

Scholars increasingly seek to proffer microfoundations for macro management theory, notably strategic management theory. These microfoundations naturally revolve around human resources. We argue that proper microfoundations for strategic management theory must recognize that the management of motivation is first and foremost a matter of the management of cognitions of organizational members, an insight that we found in goal-framing theory, an emerging perspective based on cognitive science, behavioral economics, and social psychology. Building on this insight, we argue that a key reason why strategic goals matter to firm performance - that is, firm-level value creation and value capture and sustained competitive heterogeneity - is that such goals influence value creation rooted in employee motivations. Unfolding this idea allows us to generate new insight in the relations between value creation, strategic leadership and strategic goals.

This article discusses management science and the contextual factors that influence how employees respond to various leadership styles. Research has explored how group level collectivism might moderate the relationship between transformational leadership and employee attitudes. The author reflects on how the use of other leadership styles, such as transactional, might influence these relationships. With consideration of increased diversity within work groups and the growth of international business, cultural values and the reaction of employees to various leadership styles warrants increased attention.

The authors discuss research by Thomas Ng and others into whether cultural factors are related to the relationship between job satisfaction and job performance. The authors note Ng's findings that, in cultures that value high individualism, low power distance and high masculinity, there was a stronger relationship between job satisfaction and performance on job-related tasks. Fewer moderating effects between job satisfaction and contextual job performance, including such behaviors as altruism in the workplace, were found.

Real options (RO) analysis has been of growing interest to the academic community as a promising approach to supporting investment decisions under uncertainty. In this article we examine an applied investment decision in the telecommunications industry to highlight the main benefits associated with using real options. The paper then discusses the theoretical issues raised by real options. Specifically, we examine two research streams to explain how real options contributes to a theoretical understanding of strategic management, and to better understand the gap between theory and practice of real options. Finally, we lay out an agenda for future research.

How do employees who survive downsizing react compared to those who did not have experience with it? The answer to this question is of utmost importance nowadays because organizations have increasingly turned to downsizing as a way to cut costs and enhance profitability.

Leadership and management practices are key factors inthe sustainability of rapid growth and high performance in small- tomedium-size businesses (SMEs).Most SMEs are unable to sustain suchgrowth.This article identifies five management practices that can aidSMEs in adapting to this growth.In order to identify these practices,interviews were conducted with 15 CEOs from Canadian high-growthentrepreneurial ventures, and literature discussing complexity sciences andself-organizing behavior was reviewed. These practices provide the necessary infrastructure for SMEs when theformal structures and systems already established are unable to support therapidly growing company.The five practices, which are part of the largerbehavior of self-organizing, are business logic, capture and share information,build relationships, manage organizational politics, and leadership style. Establishing a clear vision and being available for the employees--coreconcepts of business logic--allows CEOs to steer the direction of the companywhile still encouraging employees to be creative and share new ideas.W.L.Gore & Associates is one example of a company that has been able to usesuch practices to maintain fast growth and high performance for almost 50years. (SRD)

The seemingly unlimited availability of science and engineering (S&E) talent in emerging economies and the increasing difficulties of finding such talent in advanced economies have given rise to a new trend: the global sourcing of S&E talent. This paper examines the antecedents and dynamics of this trend. In particular, it examines the coevolution of macroeconomic forces, domestic and offshore national policies, industry dynamics, and firm-level offshoring capabilities driving today's offshoring decisions. The analysis exploits findings from the Offshoring Research Network (ORN) project. By taking a dynamic and multilevel perspective on next-generation offshoring, this paper may inform both firm-level strategies and national policy-making.

The article focuses on a study by Bard Kuvaas and Anders Dysvik testing their hypothesis that the development opportunities for permanent employees affect how temporary employees view their positions, their job behavior, and their social exchange relationship with the organization. The authors note that Kuvaas and Dysvik employ a social information processing perspective in which the social climate of an organization is a factor. The authors report that this hypothesis was validated in Kuvaas and Dysvik's survey of 375 temporary employees.

In this article, we define good scholarship, highlight our points of disagreement with Locke and Latham (2009), and call for further academic research to examine the full range of goal setting's effects. We reiterate our original claim that goal setting, like a potent medication, can produce both beneficial effects and systematic, negative outcomes (Ordóñez, Schweitzer, Galinsky, & Bazerman, 2009), and as a result, it should be carefully prescribed and closely monitored.

Goal setting is one of the most replicated and influential paradigms in the management literature. Hundreds of studies conducted in numerous countries and contexts have consistently demonstrated that setting specific, challenging goals can powerfully drive behavior and boost performance. Advocates of goal setting have had a substantial impact on research, management education, and management practice. In this article, we argue that the beneficial effects of goal setting have been overstated and that systematic harm caused by goal setting has been largely ignored. We identify specific side effects associated with goal setting, including a narrow focus that neglects non-goal areas, a rise in unethical behavior, distorted risk preferences, corrosion of organizational culture, and reduced intrinsic motivation. Rather than dispensing goal setting as a benign, over-the-counter treatment for motivation, managers and scholars need to conceptualize goal setting as a prescription-strength medication that requires careful dosing, consideration of harmful side effects, and close supervision. We offer a warning label to accompany the practice of setting goals.

The article reviews the book "Leader development for transforming organizations: growing leaders for tomorrow",edited by David V. Day, Stephen J. Zaccaro and Stanley M. Halpin.

The article discusses a study by researcher Michael Song and his team into what factors can be used to predict success in ventures based around innovative technology. The study consisted of a meta-analysis analyzing successful technology companies to determine how some technology firms succeed despite high rates of failure. The analysis suggested that factors such as supply chain integration, marketing skills, patent protection and market scope of companies are important factors in success. The study also indicated that research and development (R&D) investments and the experience level of entrepreneurs were not important elements in company success.

In the extant organizational, management, and strategy literatures there are now frequent calls for microfoundations. However, there is little consensus on what microfoundations are and what they are not. In this paper we first (briefly) review the history of the microfoundations discussion and then discuss what microfoundations are and are not. We highlight four misconceptions or “half-truths” about microfoundations: 1) that microfoundations are psychology, human resources, or micro-organizational behavior, 2) that borrowed concepts constitute microfoundations, 3) that microfoundations lead to an infinite regress, and 4) that microfoundations deny the role of structure and institutions. We discuss both the partial truths and the misconceptions associated with the above understandings of microfoundations, and we argue that questions of social aggregation and emergence need to be center stage in any discussion of microfoundations. We link our arguments about microfoundations and aggregation with closely related calls for new areas of research, such as “behavioral strategy” and the domain of multilevel human capital research. We discuss various forms of social aggregation and also highlight associated opportunities for future research, specifically the origins of capabilities and competitive advantage.

Despite discussion in the popular and academic press, the connection between value judgments and economic success is still unclear in the minds of many executives. Management grounded in value choices for the organization that build compatibility between the individual and the organization is fundamental to decision making. Values-based management lays the foundation for the development of mission and subsequent corporate and individual plans and goals by enabling managers to address and resolve unavoidable dilemmas. Values-based management serves as an essential first step toward building a high growth organization in which individual performance improves and heightened individual achievement drives economic success.

As income and wealth inequality hit historic highs, community development leaders are searching for ways to create good jobs and revitalize struggling urban communities. The search has led an increasing number to focus on approaches that involve broad-based ownership models as key tools for creating community wealth. There are many models of enterprises that have a fundamental purpose of benefiting workers and communities. These include employee stock ownership plan (ESOP)-owned companies, cooperatives, community development corporations, community development financial institutions (CDFIs), s, municipally owned enterprises, social enterprises, B corporations, and others. This paper provides an overview of these different community-based ownership forms of business ownership, how to use them effectively, and what benefits the different strategies can provide. Additionally, the paper highlights novel ways to combine these forms into comprehensive community building strategies as with Market Creek Plaza in San Diego and the Cleveland model of networked worker cooperatives in Cleveland, Ohio. Lastly, recent efforts to promote cooperatives and community wealth building in major U.S. cities, including New York City; Madison, Wisconsin; Richmond, Virginia; Denver, Colorado, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Jacksonville, Florida; and Rochester, New York.