The Boundary Problem in Workplace Democracy: Who Constitutes the Corporate Demos?

Abstract

This article brings to bear findings from the debate on the boundary problem in democratic theory on discussions of workplace democracy to argue that workplace democrats’ focus on workers is unjustified and that more constituencies will have to be included in any prospective scheme of workplace democracy. It thereby provides a valuable and underdiscussed perspective on workplace democracy that goes beyond the debate’s usual focus on the clarification and justification of workplace democrats’ core claim. It also goes beyond approaches like stakeholder theory in law and economics that determine decision-making rights without taking into account genuinely democratic considerations. My discussion proceeds by considering three principles for inclusion from democratic theory for the specific case of the corporation. I submit that two of them, the all-coerced and the all-subjected principle, are not appropriate for this specific case, because they cannot capture the distinguishing features of the corporation. The all-affected principle however is appropriate but has a very wide range. I further argue that this is not as big of a problem as it first might seem and that this principle is still the most appropriate for defining the demos of the democratic corporation. The article closes by pointing out the consequences of this result for the workplace democracy debate and for the legitimacy of the market as a coordination mechanism.

The Demos of the Democratic Firm

“…The controversy has recently extended to the debate on the boundaries of democracy in the workplace, with some defending that suppliers, local communities, and others whose interests are substantially affected by corporate decisions be included in their making (Stehr, 2022) and others favoring that only employees, insofar as only them are subject to companies' directive power, be included (Archer, 2010).…”

“…It excludes third parties that, albeit unsubjected to democratic firms' rules and directives, may be objectionably affected by them-say, due to their pollution or monopoly pricing-instead favoring the All-Affected Principle, which requires that all those affected by a decision be included in its making (Moriarty, 2010;Stehr, 2022).…”

“…These contributions have far from settled the debate on the demos of the democratic firm, however, for they have either weighed in on the debate with no reference to the boundary problem (Moriarty, 2010) or endorsed one response to the problem with no discussion of alternative responses (Bengtson, 2022a). And those who have sought to rank the responses on offer, such as Archer (2010) and Stehr (2022), have done so with no reference to the reasons democracy in the workplace is required in the first place. They have done little, in brief, to prevent the recent stalemate in the debate on the boundary problem from traveling from discussions on the state to discussions on the workplace.…”

In Defense of Shirking in Capitalist Firms: Worker Resistance vs. Managerial Power

“…First, some unjustifiably reject the role of adversarial agency within the firm and hence categorically criticize shirking as it undermines cooperative norms in economic organizations (Heath 2014;Singer 2019b). Second, other political theorists do not pay much attention to shirking as an act of worker resistance because they primarily focus on questions about institutional models that articulate and justify how the legal structure of the firm should be designed (Claassen 2022;Ferreras 2017;Malleson 2014;Stehr 2023).…”