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Firms as Political Entities: Saving Democracy Through Economic Bicameralism. By Ferreras Isabelle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 226p. $99.99 cloth, $28.99 paper.
If we think of the changes in work and human labor over the past three centuries, we might characterize them as a movement from private to public. First, with the industrial and commercial revolutions of the eithteenth century, work was brought out of the domestic sphere and into public space, simultaneously socializing it and freeing it from traditional domestic norms and hierarchies. Second, with the labor movements and socialist programs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, attempts were made to bring work fully into the public sphere by bringing it under the purview of public norms. This was borne out in the various attempts to democratize the workplace and bring it under the control of workers, just as democratic reformers and revolutionaries were attempting the same feat in the public sphere more broadly.
As Isabelle Ferreras notes in Firms as Political Entities, however, the latter half of the twentieth century saw this general movement stall. Work is still considered a private concern, thus enabling the persistence of domestic forms of hierarchy and domination within the public sphere. Ferreras’s argument is that this stalling is the result of our understanding of the sort of institution that is the “firm.” By conceiving of the workplace, and therefore work, in purely economic terms, we have missed other values at stake in the institution of the firm. To complete the movement of work from the private sphere to the public requires that we recognize the political and social nature of contemporary labor, and that we restructure the governance of firms accordingly.
On Ferreras’s account, the development of economic theory led to a view of the firm as an institution fundamentally underwritten by instrumental rationality—the idea that human action is motivated solely by the intended achievement of some action-independent end. While various parties may interact with the firm in various ways, they do so for commons reasons, namely, to pursue self-interest, however understood. This theory, according to the author, has had the normative consequence of legitimating...