Welcome! I’m Mark Hand, and I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas at Arlington. I also run The Stakehold, a weekly newsletter on employee ownership and workplace democracy.
Some other things I’m involved and interested in:
Researching the growth of employee ownership and workplace democracy. Supported by grants from a family foundation, a fellowship at Rutgers’ Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Participation, and an award from the Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute at SMU, I am working on projects cover why family firms might choose different forms of employee ownership, why owners of breweries might set up employee stock ownership plans, the democratic habits of employee ownership trusts, and designing policy recommendations on employee ownership trusts and perpetual purpose trusts.
Teaching and researching U.S. politics. On the politics side, I teach courses on Democratic Theory, Research Methods, American Politics, Campaigns and Elections, Public Policy Theory, and Careers in Political Science. My dissertation investigated in part how the hiring practices of campaign teams affected the outcomes of congressional elections (spoiler: experience matters less than team familiarity).
Teaching and researching Texas politics and policy. My Texas-oriented research, supported at points by grants from the IC2 Institute and the Mitchell Foundation, has covered policy responses to Winter Storm Uri, how to predict entrepreneurial firm growth in rural Texas using machine learning, the emergence of local policy narratives in response to Covid-19, and recommendations for geothermal energy policy.
Building entrepreneurial teams and organizations. In my dissertation I investigated hiring patterns on political campaign teams. I have also managed entrepreneurial teams at early-stage investment funds and nonprofits, and invested in startup teams through Gray Ghost Ventures, Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, Oxford Seed Fund, and UnLtd USA (née Techstars Impact).
Some other things I’m interested in and will write more about soon: philosophical pragmatism, workplace democracy, and polyconscious democracy.
Mark Clayton Hand, Ph.D. 