Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States

Schwartz, Louis B.; Hirschman, Albert O.

doi:10.2307/3311348

Cited by 141 publications

(215 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

145

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…To summarize, two key findings emerge from this 3.3. empirical section. Firstly, upon perceiving a collapse in meaningfulness associated with SA work, most junior or mid-level auditors ended up choosing "exit" over "voice" (Hirschman, 1970). On their path to exiting their responsible career, they (more or less) openly expressed cynical statements of disbelief about the main purpose of work and were rather jaundice-eyed towards "managerial exhortation" (Fleming and Spicer, 2003) aimed at maintaining a high-level of commitment and motivation.…”

Section: Sustainabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Auditors’ search for meaningfulness in sustainability assurance work

Gaudy

Malsch

2023

QRAM

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Purpose This study aims to examine auditors’ search for meaningfulness in sustainability assurance (SA) work. Design/methodology/approach The authors collected ethnographic data over a nine-month period from two small firms offering SA services in France between 2018 and 2019. Findings Auditors’ experiences of meaningfulness are facilitated by shared sustainability values among colleagues, social acknowledgement of like-minded profiles and the feeling that working in a “small firm” provides a more fulfilling and committed-to-sustainability environment than conventional assurance work in large accounting firms. The search for meaningfulness collapses when auditors realize not only the limits of their agentic and transformative capacities but also their unintended complicity in certifying the reports of companies with poor sustainability performance. Because they struggle to reconcile the assessment of their professional practice with their value system, the participants are tempted to disengage from their work by giving up a sustainability career and/or by reframing SA work as an advisory rather than a control function. Originality/value The authors approach SA not as an organizational project of professional expansion, through which accounting firms attempt to expand their scope of practice, but as an individual and reflexive search of aligning assurance work to their value system. Auditors’ search for meaningfulness is a strong counterpoint to the financial auditing literature, which portrays auditors as professionals with a low sense of purpose at work, but also to the literature criticizing accounting firms’ discursive processes of “depoliticization” (Malsch, 2013) and “de-emotionalization” (Rodrigue et al., 2022) of socio-environmental issues.

show abstract

Section: Sustainabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Auditors’ search for meaningfulness in sustainability assurance work

Gaudy

Malsch

2023

QRAM

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Loyalty has an inherent partiality to it (Hirschman, 1970;Oliver, 1999). People signal their loyalty to a group when they take actions that show that they will help to advance the cause and purpose of a group even at a cost to an individual, especially the self (Crone & Laham, 2015;Hildreth et al, 2016).…”

Section: Ffs May Invite Partisan Evaluations Independent Of Partisan ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Who sees which political falsehoods as more acceptable and why: A new look at in-group loyalty and trustworthiness.

Galak¹,

Critcher²

2023

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Many politicians—even those who occupy some of the most powerful offices in the world—lie. Five studies examined how conservative and liberal Americans responded to media reports of politicians’ falsehoods—that is, flagged falsehoods (FFs). Even accounting for partisan biases in how much participants dismissed such reports as fake news and assumed that such lies were unintentional, we consistently observed partisan evaluations in how much FFs were seen as justifiable: Republicans and Democrats alike saw their own party’s FFs as more acceptable (Studies 1–4). This charitability did not reflect unconditional in-group favoritism. Instead, it was strongest for policy FFs—those meant to advance a party’s explicit agenda—as opposed to personal FFs about a politician’s past (Study 2) or electoral FFs that strayed from parties’ explicit goals by aiming to disenfranchise legally eligible voters (Study 4). Although FFs can undermine general trustworthiness in the eyes of both in-group and out-group members, policy FFs in particular signal partisan trustworthiness (Studies 3–5)—the belief that a politician can be trusted by their own political side and not by the other. For likeminded partisans, such partisan trustworthiness predicted not only the perceived acceptability of FFs, but also perceptions of the politician as a more prototypically moral actor, even outside of the political sphere. These findings validate the importance of our dual conception of trustworthiness in intergroup contexts.

show abstract

“…Rather, they may first turn to ways of working “under the radar” to provide their own services, such as burial societies and savings groups, policing and security, or even dispute resolution. These alternatives to engaging with the state or authorities can be seen as acts of crafting alternative institutions, following Kashwan et al (2019) or, in Hirschmann's terms, adopting exit rather than voice (Hirschmann, 1970).…”

Section: Insights From Our Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Citizen action for accountability in challenging contexts: What have we learned?

Gaventa

Joshi

Anderson

2023

Development Policy Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Summary Motivation While much is known about how citizens mobilize and make claims for accountability in more democratic, stable, and peaceful settings, little is known about how accountability dynamics work in more challenging contexts—those more democratically weak, politically fragile, and affected by legacies of violence and conflict. Purpose This article introduces a special issue that brings together findings from across the Action for Empowerment and Accountability programme. The programme explored citizen action for accountability and citizens' experiences of governance in Mozambique, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan and, to a lesser degree, Egypt—countries that reflect challenging conditions now common in many places across the world. Methods and approach We introduce and summarize the key findings of eight commissioned articles—some which explore specific themes across the body of research, and some that report findings of particular multi‐country studies. We analyse these findings in relation to what they tell us about the contextual factors that matter, the strategies adopted, and the consequences of citizen‐led social and political action. Findings We find a number of contextual challenges for citizen action that are common, though not unique, to these settings. Despite authoritarian governance histories, and norms of fear, low expectations, and patriarchal exclusion we see diverse examples of social and political action, both open questioning of authorities and dissent and more under the radar and mediated responses. Such efforts have led to increased visibility of grievances, increased citizen agency, some concrete responses from authorities, and evidence of progressive norm change. Policy implications We argue that even in challenging contexts there are prospects for finding some space for productive citizen engagement and citizen‐led social and political action. These are more likely to be found from taking a “citizen‐eye” view to relevant governance dynamics, actors, and identifying the most important issues. Networks and alliances, including with donors, are significant. But accountability goals in such contexts need to be realistic and recognize the importance of small steps and establishing the building blocks of better governance.

show abstract

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States

Cited by 141 publications

References 0 publications

Auditors’ search for meaningfulness in sustainability assurance work

Auditors’ search for meaningfulness in sustainability assurance work

Who sees which political falsehoods as more acceptable and why: A new look at in-group loyalty and trustworthiness.

Citizen action for accountability in challenging contexts: What have we learned?

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About