This paper clarifies the usage of Albert Hirschman's categories of market behaviour as of exit and voice in debates about workplace democracy by taking seriously his critique of the neoclassical analysis of competition. Promarket liberals are generally hostile to the idea of workplace democracy and tend to favour top-down hierarchies as a way of organising labour. This hostility is generally inspired by the neoclassical analysis of exploitation and efficiency, which leads them to defend distributions achieved through exit-based competitive equilibria. Following Hirschman, I propose to consider a hypothetical alternative: a democratic equilibrium, reached through the use of voice. I show that it would present the same appealing characteristics than its competitive counterpart while also accounting for the non-ideal conditions in which markets operate. Support for free markets should entail support for workplace democracy minimally understood as a strengthening of voice.
Sean Irving’s book Hayek’s Market Republicanism: The Limits of Liberty shows that the commonly accepted reading of Hayek as a liberal thinker is mistaken, and that his political writings are best understood as belonging to the broader tradition of republicanism. The distinction is important for understanding many aspects of Hayek’s thought, and especially his rejection of social justice and majoritarian democracy. In that sense, one of the book’s more general merits is its implicit contribution to ongoing debates between republican ‘freedom as non-domination’ and liberal ‘freedom as non-interference’. Irving focuses on what he sees as a contradiction between Hayek’s chief concerns about the state as the main source of domination and his disregard for private forms of power, and especially within the capitalist firm. I argue, however, that the example of Hayek should lead us to consider a more prosaic conclusion: freedom as non-domination is a concept less useful for criticising the free market than Irving and left-leaning Republicans seem to assume.
There are two opposing views concerning intuitive cases of wage exploitation. The first denies that they are cases of exploitation at all. It is based on the nonworseness claim: there is nothing wrong with a discretionary mutually beneficial employment relationship. The second is the reasonable view: some employment relationships can be exploitative even if employers have no duty towards their employees. This article argues that the reasonable view does not completely defeat defences of wage exploitation, because these do not rely solely on the nonworseness claim. They also rely on the idea, popularised by Alan Wertheimer, that exploitation is a form of disequilibrium price occurring in defective markets. The article then proceeds to criticise Wertheimer’s account through neoclassical, new institutional, and Austrian economics. It concludes that considerations for economic efficiency are irrelevant to assessing intuitions regarding exploitation.
This paper contributes to the ongoing critique of a body of literature that could be called 'deliberative corporate governance'. This literature argues that corporations should adopt deliberative forms of governance that include their various stakeholders, instead of a top-down managerial hierarchy. Governance is here understood as the making and enforcing of rules concerning the ends pursued by corporations (or any other organisation; Scherer et al., 2006, p. 506; Scherer & Palazzo, 2011, p. 900). 'Stakeholders' is a term that has been criticised for being vague (Orts & Strudler, 2009). It is tentatively defined as all the economic agents that constitute the contractual members of a corporation and those who are affected by it (who have a 'stake' in it -the management, the employees, the owners, the customers), although its meaning will be extended and discussed below. This change in how corporations operate is to be justified based on an extension of the scope of corporate social responsibility (hereafter, CSR), hence the broad argument this literature relies on shall be labelled 'deliberative corporate social responsibility' (DCSR).
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