Mark Clayton Hand, Ph.D.

Welcome! I’m Mark Hand, professor of political science at the University of Texas at Arlington. I also publish The Stakehold, a weekly newsletter on employee ownership and the ownership economy.

Some things I’m involved and interested in:

Researching employee ownership and workplace democracy. Supported by a Kelso Fellowship at the Rutgers Institute for Employee Ownership and Profit-Sharing, the Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute at SMU, and Schmidt Futures, I have worked on projects covering 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, steward-ownership and perpetual purpose trusts. My work has appeared in International Review of Applied Economics, Business Horizons, Journal of Management Inquiry, Human Resource Management Journal, as well as in book chapters with Routledge and Edward Elgar. I also have case studies in publication with Harvard Business Publishing.

Researching and teaching on the impact of AI on education and democracy.  I am Co-Chair of the College of Liberal Arts’ AI and Emerging Technologies Working Group, which will launch an AI & Society Research Fellowship in 2026. I also incorporate AI into my teaching, efforts that have been highlighted in The Chronicle of Higher Education. My research focuses on the impact of AI on democracy, arguing that representative democracy will not survive the coming rise of polyconsciousness. 

Teaching and researching policy and politics. I teach courses on Democratic Theory, Research Methods, American Politics, Campaigns and Elections, Public Policy Theory, Policy Entrepreneurship, 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). I have also written about politics in Texas, with support from the IC2 Institute and the Mitchell Foundation. I have examined 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. This work has appeared in European Policy Analysis, PLOS ONE, and Policy Studies Journal, and in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Policy Entrepreneurship. 

Building entrepreneurial teams and organizations. In my dissertation I investigated hiring patterns on political campaign teams. I have also managed and invested in startup teams through Gray Ghost Ventures, Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, Oxford Seed Fund, and UnLtd USA (née Techstars Impact). 

Other things I’m interested in and will write more about soon: philosophical pragmatism, workplace and organizational democracy, and polyconscious democracy.