In the Company of Owners: The Truth About Stock Options. (Bookshelf).

In the Company of Owners: The Truth About Stock Options. By Joseph Blasi, Douglas Kruse and Aaron Bernstein. Basic Books, 316 pages. $27.50.

Blame it on AT&T -- well, sort of. In the Company of Owners uses the book equivalent of a journalist's anecdotal lead: It opens by tracing the origin of stock options to William Shockley, a brilliant but curmudgeonly scientist who, unhappy with the giant telephone company's refusal to let him share some of the success stemming from his ideas, decamped in the late 1950s for what later became Silicon Valley. Once there, Shockley -- a Nobel Prize winner in 1956 for helping create the transistor, later to become notorious for his theories on racial superiority -- started a small company of his own and lured some fellow scientists to join him.

Shockley had the shocking idea, at the time, that he and others should share in the bounty created by new ideas, patents and the sales they created. With the help of several key financial backers, he put this notion into action. Fairchild Camera & Instrument put up a major investment for an "option" on the new company, which was then dubbed Fairchild Semiconductor, and later bought out the principals, making them rich men.

Obviously, things have changed dramatically in the past 40 years. But the authors' point is that it took an act of rebellion -- the business equivalent of a minor mutiny -- to prove that giving employees an ownership stake in a business could be a key motivational tool that would drive success. And it was the high-tech industry, with the Bay Area as it Ground Zero, that truly popularized the idea of giving employees stock options.

The authors combine good research with a nice narrative style, which is a byproduct of their backgrounds: Blasi, a sociologist, and Kruse, an economist, are professors at Rutgers University's School of Management and Labor Relations, while Berstein is a senior writer at BusinessWeek.

This isn't an exercise in objectivity: While the authors do believe that at many companies, "option-induced avarice spurred corporate chieftains to cut corners, cook the books and dupe investors into buying shares at inflated prices," they also contend that "most corporations in America would enjoy more motivated workers and larger profits if they embraced partnership capitalism centered around employee stock options."

They use interviews with company executives, especially in the high-tech field, to make a case that options really do make a difference in attracting and -- especially in recent years -- retaining key employees when a company's fortunes are at a low ebb. Of course, that may mean repricing options when the stock has fallen dramatically, never an easy sell to outside investors.

But the net reward of aggressive option programs, they argue, is worth it, even if it that is difficult for older, larger companies without the culture germinated so long ago by Shockley and his band of scientists.