Exit, voice, and ethics

✍ Scribed by Michael Keeley; Jill W. Graham

• Book ID: 104748594
• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1991
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 547 KB
• Volume: 10
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0167-4544
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00383236

✦ Synopsis

Hirschman's (1970)

exit, voice, and loyalty framework draws attention to both economic and political behavior as instruments for organizational change. The framework is simple but powerful; it has stimulated much cross-disciplinary analysis and debate. This paper extends this analysis by examining normative implications of Hirschman's basic premise: that exit and voice are primarily mechanisms for enhancing organizational (vs. individual) well-being.

Roughly twenty years ago, Mbert Hirschman (1970) put together an important set of concepts for social analysis -those of exit, voice, and loyalty. Hirschman's conceptual framework has spawned much theoretical work and descriptive research (see, e.g., Rokkan, 1974;Hirschman, 1981; Foxley, McPherson, and O'Donnell, 1986). In contrast, normative aspects of this framework have received little attention. This paper explains and develops the normative implications of Hirschman's theory.