Dans le « Grand résumé » de son ouvrage, Le Caché de La Poste. Enquête sur l’organisation du travail des facteurs, Nicolas Jounin révèle l’effort original qui fut le sien pour éclairer les enjeux du ...monde du travail. Son étude des facteurs en France se lit comme un cas critique du monde du travail contemporain, qui sonne l’alarme des réorganisations en cours dans l’économie de services. S’y donne à voir la pression à la dite rationalisation du travail « peu qualifié », pourtant considéré comm...
When people go to work, they cease to be citizens. At their desks they are transformed into employees, subordinate to the hierarchy of the workplace. The degree of their sense of voicelessness may ...vary from employer to employer, but it is real and growing, inflamed by populist propaganda that ridicules democracy as weak and ineffective amid global capitalism. At the same time, corporations continue untouched and even unremarked as a major source of the problem. Relying on 'economic bicameralism' to consider firms as political entities, this book sheds new light on the institutions of industrial relations that have marked the twentieth century, and argues that it is time to recognize that firms are a peculiar institution that must be properly organized in order to unshackle workers' motivation and creativity, and begin nurturing democracy again.
Democratize the capitalist enterprise. Cornerstone of shared and sustainable prosperity is the first essay published in Spanish by Belgian sociologist and political scientist Isabelle Ferreras. This ...is an original and revised version of the essay originally published in English in 2019, Democratizing Firms – a Cornerstone of Shared and Sustainable Prosperity, by the Center for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP). This new version in Spanish has been enriched with contributions, specifically indicated in the text, from two other recent publications by Isabelle Ferreras: “Those Who Work are Labor Investors: Recognizing the Two Core Constituencies of Capitalist Firms” and “From Shareholder Primacy to a Dual Majority Board”, the latter written with Julie Battilana. Both texts were published in 2021 under the Aspen Institute Business & Society Program's Ideas Lab on Worker Voice in Corporate Governance. This new version, original and enriched, has been translated and prepared by Sebastián Pérez Sepúlveda.
In the context of capitalist democracies, the contradiction between people's expectations of equality and the subordination they experience at work is intense. I argue that it is the defining ...experience of the contradiction between capitalism and democracy. Capitalism grants political rights to property owners, while democracy grants political rights to the citizens recognized as equals. They are thus regimes of government that distribute rights in dramatically different ways. This essay is grounded in the understanding that firms are best analyzed as “political entities,” and workers as “labor investors,” and have thus a legitimate right to bear on the government of their work life. Examining the history of how political entities have become democratic through the innovation of bicameralism provides a “real utopia”: economic bicameralism, that is, a set of patterns that may be applied to democratize and transition the corporate firm beyond capitalism.
Gouverner le capitalisme ? prend au sérieux l’entreprise comme institution majeure du capitalisme. Poursuivant le projet entamé dans Critique politique du travail (Ferreras, 2007a), il situe l’enjeu ...de son gouvernement dans une proposition d’histoire longue et critique de l’émancipation des rapports économiques capitalistes de la logique de la domesticité et de leur expansion au sein de la sphère publique démocratique, plaçant ces rapports au cœur d’un éclairage de la contradiction capitalism...
La démocratie est une forme de société et ne saurait s'arrêter aux portes de l'entreprise. Au contraire, l'histoire des droits politiques permet de penser la transition de notre économie vers un mode ...de gouvernement plus soutenable et respectueux des limites planétaires.
In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, an important conceptual battleground for democratic theorists ought to be, it would seem, the capitalist firm. We are now painfully aware that the ...typical model of government in so-called investor-owned companies remains profoundly oligarchic, hierarchical, and unequal. Renewing with the literature of the 1970s and 1980s on workplace democracy, a few political theorists have started to advocate democratic reforms of the workplace by relying on an analogy between firm and state. To the extent that a firm is an organization comparable to the state, it too ought to be ruled along democratic lines. Our paper tests the robustness of the analogy between firm and state by considering six major objections to it: (1) the objection from a difference in ends, (2) the objection from shareholders' property rights, (3) the objection from worker's consent, (4) the objection from workers' exit opportunities, (5) the objection from workers' (lack of) expertise, and (6) the objection from the fragility of firms. We find all of these objections wanting. While the paper does not ambition to settle the issue of workplace democracy at once, our goal is to pave the way for a more in-depth study of the ways in which firms and states can be compared and the possible implications this may have for our understanding of the nature of managerial authority and the governance of firms.
PDF
