Reading :: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States
By Albert Hirschman

Every once in a while, I read a landmark book, usually in someone else's field or discipline, and come away unimpressed. Sometimes that happens because the book has had such a deep impact that its precepts now seem intuitive and uninteresting. Sometimes it's because the book clears away conversations to which I haven't been privy, creating a clean division. And sometimes ... I'm not sure why the book is a landmark book.

I'm not sure which category Exit, Voice, and Loyalty occupies. This 1970 book, based in economics, considers the phenomenon of "repairable lapses of economic actors" (p.1). In the face of such lapses, Hirschman says, individuals might exercise either the exit option (stop participating—e.g., customers stop buying the product) or the voice option (complain—e.g., customers complain to management) (p.4). Both options provide opportunities to repair the lapses. Hirschman asks: under what circumstances do individuals prefer one option over another? How do they interact? When do they work jointly? How can organizations perfect them (p.5)?

Although Hirschman begins with the example of customers buying a product, he quickly expands the question to individuals working within an organization, and he expands "organization" to apply to families, communities, religions, and nation-states. Exit reflects economics while voice reflects politics (p.15). Exit involves escape from an organization or system, while voice involves changing that organization or system (p.30).

It's a neat divide, "suspiciously neat," Hirschman acknowledges (p.15). Indeed, it encompasses individuals both internal and external to the organization; commercial, public, and nonprofit organizations; and family, state, and church as well as more formally defined organizations. That is, the exit/voice divide seems totalizing and Hirschman seems to be arguing that it is a general principle that works in roughly the same way across all of these social arrangements.

True, "the same way" does not mean that every organization has the same characteristics. For instance, "basic social organizations" such as "the family, the state, or the church" do not actually offer a realistic exit option, so individuals only have the voice option (p.33). This is not true in the Western economies, in which exit is always an option, but it was true in the Soviet economy (p.34)!

Now we get to the concept of loyalty: loyalists refuse to exit, so they can either voice concerns or suffer in silence (p.38). Interestingly, voice is expensive to use; the less expensive it is, the more individuals will use it (p.43). Hirschman adds that voice is qualitative while exit is quantitative (p.43).

There is much more to the book (although not that much more—it's a thin book). But it left me wanting even more explanation. Does the voice/exit dichotomy really do an adequate job across different types of social groupings, from family to church to state, as well as market? Do people apply exit and voice in roughly the same way if they are customers vs. employees? Do people not have additional options, such as hypocrisy, work-to-rule, selective belief, and double consciousness? Is the framework too individualistic to examine more complex group phenomena? What happens when different groups intersect, as they inevitably do (ex: every individual working for a company is also part of a family, state, and religious group)? The exit/voice dichotomy does seem like a starting place, but it seems too simple of a bifurcation to shoulder the burden Hirschman wants to place on it.

On the other hand, I understand that sometimes one has to clear the decks in order to see the problem in a different way, and perhaps that is what Hirschman is doing here. It's worth taking a look for yourself, from the perspective of your own discipline or field, and seeing what sort of work this dichotomy might be able to do for you.