![]() … The broader audience, particularly corporate managers, trade unionists and policy-makers of the reformist left, should welcome the publication and benefit from its engaging arguments. Her powerful and progressive language is also timely, at a moment when workers’ participation is increasingly being reformulated and colonised by mainstream corporate governance and corporate social responsibility discourse. With her brave and provocative policy contribution, Ferreras leans out from the academic ivory tower, engaging with burning social and political concerns. It offers an exciting intellectual challenge and a creative spinning of theoretical arguments drawing on different disciplines and scholarly sources. ![]() 'All in all, the book is a refreshing addition to re-emerging debates on industrial democracy. Philippe Van Parijs - University of Louvain, Hoover Chair of Economic and Social Ethics This is the sort of smart interdisciplinary thinking that we need to shed light on the present and feed hope for the future.' ‘A simple and radical proposal - bicameral firms - supported by a powerful analogy with the history of political democracy and by an insightful analysis of the growing tension between corporate despotism and civic equality. ![]() Ferreras has launched that debate.'Ĭhristopher Mackin - American Working Capital, LLC Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations In times of skyrocketing inequality, a deeper debate about the ‘theory of the firm' is urgent and timely. Political scientist Isabelle Ferreras introduces us to an alternative view of the corporation as a political association comprised of stakeholders who expect to be governed according to democratic rules and norms. ‘Economists have long been content to describe corporations as an abstract legal shell, a ‘nexus of contracts' governed by narrowly constructed notions of property rights. She shows how to extend democratic structures into these authoritarian entities that play such a commanding role in our lives and economy.'Įlaine Bernard - Labor and Worklife Program, Harvard Law School, Harvard University With corporate power challenging democracy everywhere, Ferreras challenges workers, unions, and anyone interested in breathing life into democracy to recognize firms as political entities. Arguing that workers, not just capital, are investors in enterprises, Ferreras demands that workers be granted the rights of citizenship and a role in the government of firms. While many have lamented the autocratic rule of corporations, Isabelle Ferreras offers a radical and exciting proposal on how democracy can be inserted into corporate governance. ‘Democracy must not stop at the workplace door. ‘An urgent and exciting contribution to the debate about corporate power and democracy: Ferreras pushes us to reach beyond the existing forms of the corporation to ask what democratic organization might look like in our workplaces.'ĭavid Singh Grewal - Yale Law School, Yale University The book is a brilliant contribution to the kind of progressive thought desperately needed for the twenty-first century.'Įrik Olin Wright - Vilas Distinguished Professor, University of Wisconsin, Madison Past President, American Sociological Association 2011–12 She provides a powerful, nuanced critique of the autocratic forms of rule that are taken-for-granted within capitalist firms as they exist, and a compelling model of an emancipatory alternative that could be realized in the future. ‘Isabelle Ferreras presents a deeply original and provocative proposal for deepening and extending the ideals of democracy in capitalist economies by democratizing the governance of corporations. ![]() Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers - Apple University and University of California, Berkeley, Editor of the Boston Review and University of Wisconsin, Madison, Director, COWS We urgently need creative, ambitious, constructive thinking, and Isabelle Ferreras delivers it: clearly, gracefully, and with great intellectual power.' So firms should be governed democratically - by a bicameral body, representing workers as well as owners of capital. Firms, she argues, are political entities, and democracy is the right kind of governance for political entities. ‘Isabelle Ferreras presents a forceful case for a very big idea. ![]()
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