Power, for All

by Julie Battilana

  51 Taylor Telford and Elizabeth Dwoskin, “Google Employees Worldwide Walk Out over Allegations of Sexual Harassment, Inequality within Company,” Washington Post, November 1, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/11/01/google-employees-worldwide-begin-walkout-over-allegations-sexual-harassment-inequality-within-company; Ryan Mac, “Disgraced Google Exec Andy Rubin Quietly Left His Venture Firm Earlier This Year,” BuzzFeed, October 13, 2019, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/andy-rubin-playground-global-google-quiet-departure.

  52 Sam Byford, “Google Employees Worldwide are Walking Out Today to Protest Handling of Sexual Misconduct,” The Verge, November 1, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/1/18051026/google-walkout-sexual-harassment-protest.

  53 Telford and Dwoskin, “Google Employees Worldwide Walk Out.”

  54 Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Google Ends Forced Arbitration for All Employee Disputes,” New York Times, February 21, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/technology/google-forced-arbitration.html.

  55 “Google’s Project Dragonfly ‘Terminated’ in China,” BBC News, July 17, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49015516.

  56 Johana Bhuiyan, “How the Google Walkout Transformed Tech Workers into Activists,” Los Angeles Times, November 6, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2019-11-06/google-employee-walkout-tech-industry-activism. On the importance of paying attention to such employee rebellions, see David Courpasson and Jean-Claude Thoenig, When Managers Rebel, 1st ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2010).

  57 Beth Kowitt, “Inside Google’s Civil War,” Fortune, January 29, 2020, https://fortune.com/longform/inside-googles-civil-war/.

  58 Kate Conger, “Hundreds of Google Employees Unionize, Culminating Years of Activism,” New York Times, January 4, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/technology/google-employees-union.html.

  59 “Home,” Alphabet Workers Union, December 15, 2020, https://alphabetworkersunion.org/.

  60 “LIVE: Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks at Brussels’ International Data Privacy Day,” Reuters (video), January 28, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug6tA6fhhdQ.

  61 Sundar Pichai, “Why Google Thinks We Need to Regulate AI,” Financial Times, January 20, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/3467659a-386d-11ea-ac3c-f68c10993b04.

  62 “What is GDRP, the EU’s New Data Protection Law?,” gdrp.eu, accessed April 7, 2021, https://gdpr.eu/what-is-gdpr/.

  63 “GDPR: Noyb.eu Filed Four Complaints over ‘Forced Consent’ against Google, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook,” noyb.eu, May 25, 2018, https://noyb.eu/en/gdpr-noybeu-filed-four-complaints-over-forced-consent-against-google-instagram-whatsapp-and.

  64 “Austrian Privacy Activist Schrems Files Complaint against Amazon,” Reuters, February 19, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/europe-privacy-amazoncom/austrian-privacy-activist-schrems-files-complaint-against-amazon-idUSL8N2AJ4ZJ.

  65 Kara Swisher, “She’s Bursting Big Tech’s Bubble,” New York Times, October 29, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/29/opinion/sway-kara-swisher-lina-khan.html.

  66 Lina M. Khan, “The Separation of Platforms and Commerce,” Columbia Law Review 119, no. 4 (2019): 973–1098; Kari Paul, “ ‘This Is Big’: U.S. Lawmakers Take Aim at Once-Untouchable Big Tech,” The Guardian, December 19, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/dec/18/google-facebook-antitrust-lawsuits-big-tech.

  67 For instance, European regulators investigated Google for seven years, which resulted in a $2.7 billion fine because the web giant was found to favor its own shopping service in search results, stifling competition. In 2019, Germany cracked down on Facebook for abuse of its market power, prohibiting the company from sharing data about users, without their consent, across Facebook-owned platforms such as Instagram and WhatsApp. See Michael A. Corrier, “Big Tech, Antitrust, and Breakup,” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, 2020.

  68 Sheelah Kolhatkar, “How Elizabeth Warren Came Up with a Plan to Break Up Big Tech,” The New Yorker, August 20, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/how-elizabeth-warren-came-up-with-a-plan-to-break-up-big-tech; Lina M. Khan, “Amazon’s Paradox,” The Yale Law Journal 126, no. 3 (2017): 710–805.

  69 Rod McGuirk, “Australia Passes Law to Make Google, Facebook Pay for News,” AP News, February 25, 2021, https://apnews.com/article/australia-law-google-facebook-pay-news-959ffb44307da22cdeebdd85290c0cde.

  70 Gabriel Gieger, “Court Rules Deliveroo Used ‘Discriminatory’ Algorithm,” Vice, January 5, 2021, https://www.vice.com/en/article/7k9e4e/court-rules-deliveroo-used-discriminatory-algorithm.

  71 Shirin Ghaffary, “After 20,000 Workers Walked out, Google Said It Got the Message. The Workers Disagree,” Vox, November 21, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/11/21/18105719/google-walkout-real-change-organizers-protest-discrimination-kara-swisher-recode-decode-podcast.

  72 Artificial Intelligence, Societal and Ethical Implications, Before the United States House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, 116th Cong. (2019) (statement of Meredith Whittaker, cofounder and codirector of AI Now Institute).

  73 For example, Genie Barton, Nicol Turner-Lee, and Paul Resnick, “Algorithmic Bias Detection and Mitigation: Best Practices and Policies to Reduce Consumer Harms,” Brookings, May 22, 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/research/algorithmic-bias-detection-and-mitigation-best-practices-and-policies-to-reduce-consumer-harms/; Sorelle A. Friedler et al., “A Comparative Study of Fairness Enhancing Interventions in Machine Learning,” in Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (2019): 329–38; Solon Barocas, Moritz Hardt, and Arvind Narayanan, Fairness and Machine Learning (fairmlbook.org, 2019).

  74 Cynthia Dwork, “Skewed or Rescued? The Emerging Theory of Algorithmic Fairness,” Berkman Klein Center, November 29, 2018, https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/skewed-or-rescued-emerging-theory-algorithmic-fairness.

  75 Brendan F. Klare et al., “Face Recognition Performance: Role of Demographic Information,” IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security 7, no. 6 (December 2012): 1789–1801.

  76 Jerry Kaplan, Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); Morgan R. Frank et al., “Toward Understanding the Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Labor,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no.14 (2019): 6531–9.

  77 John Hawksworth, Richard Berriman, and Saloni Goel, Will Robots Really Steal Our Jobs? An International Analysis of the Potential Long-Term Impact of Automation (PwC, February 2018).

  78 For key works in the sprawling literature on the future of work, see Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race Against the Machine (Lexington, MA: Digital Frontier Press, 2011); Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014); Kaplan, Humans Need Not Apply (2015); Alec Ross, The Industries of the Future (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016); and Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, The Future of the Professions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

  79 David Autor, David Mindell, and Elisabeth Reynolds, “The Work of the Future: Shaping Technology and Institutions,” MIT Work of the Future, November 17, 2020, https://workofthefuture.mit.edu/research-post/the-work-of-the-future-shaping-technology-and-institutions/.

  80 The acronym CRISPR stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,” which refers to a region of DNA that, with various CRISPR-associated proteins, functions like genetic scissors, enabling a cell or scientist to edit DNA or its messenger RNA very precisely. See Jennifer A. Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, “The New Frontier of Genome Editing with CRISPR-Cas9,” Science 346, no. 6213 (2013).

  81 Megan Rose Dickey, “Human Capital: ‘People Were Afraid of Being Critical with Me,’ ” TechCrunch, August 28, 2020, https://social.techcrunch.com/2020/08/28/human-capital-it-doesnt-have-to-be-this-way/.

  82 Ottmar Edenhofer et al., “Summary for Policymakers,” in Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate C
hange, Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

  83 Ronald Segal, The Black Diaspora: Five Centuries of the Black Experience Outside Africa (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995), 4.

  84 François Rabelais and Andrew Brown, Pantagruel: King of the Dipsodes Restored to His Natural State with His Dreadful Deeds and Exploits (London: Hesperus, 2003), 34.

  85 Yuval N. Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (New York: Harper, 2017); Derek Thompson, “Can Science Cure Aging?” The Atlantic, September 13, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/can-science-cure-aging/570121/.

  86 For just two examples, John Koetsier, “Elon Musk’s 42,000 Star-Link Satellites Could Just Save the World,” Forbes, January 9, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/01/09/elon-musks-42000-starlink-satellites-could-just-save-the-world/; and Navneet Alang, “As the Robots Arrive, We Have to Remember: Another Future is Possible,” Toronto Star, February 27, 2021, https://www.thestar.com/business/opinion/2021/02/27/as-the-robots-arrive-we-have-to-remember-another-future-is-possible.html.

  8. POWER IN CHECK

  1 Simonetta Adorni Braccesi and Mario Ascheri, eds., Politica e Cultura nelle Repubbliche Italiane dal Medioevo all’Età Moderna: Firenze, Genova, Lucca, Siena, Venezia, (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per l’Età Moderna e Contemporanea, 2001); William Marvin Bowsky, A Medieval Italian Commune: Siena Under the Nine, 1287–1355 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

  2 Estimates place the number of Sienese citizens who served in the Government of the Nine between 2,000 and 3,000 from 1287 to 1355, when Siena’s estimated population ranged from 62,000 to a peak of 100,000 before the Black Death. Although the Nine were all men (women were excluded from the city’s political life) and members of certain social classes and families were elected more often than others, the many rules of exclusion of aristocrats and other privileged citizens from serving as city governors, together with the stringent two-month term limits and twenty-month waiting period before eligibility for reappointment, gave political representation to broad swaths of Siena’s citizenry. For a detailed analysis, see Mario Ascheri, “La Siena del ‘Buon Governo’ (1287–1355),” in Adorni Braccesi and Ascheri, Politica e Cultura nelle Repubbliche Italiane, 81–107.

  3 Cameron Anderson and Sebastien Brion, “Perspectives on Power in Organizations,” Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior 1, no. 1 (2014): 67–97; Peter Fleming and André Spicer, “Power in Management and Organization Science,” Academy of Management Annals 8, no. 1 (2014): 237–98.

  4 Ellen Ochoa in discussion with the authors, April 2019 and October 2020.

  5 Raj Chetty et al., “Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States,” NBER working paper 24441 (2018); Cecilia L. Ridgeway, Framed by Gender: How Gender Inequality Persists in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

  6 John Matthew Amis, Johanna Mair, and Kamal Munir, “The Organizational Reproduction of Inequality,” Academy of Management Annals 14, no. 1 (2020): 195–230.

  7 Michael L. Coats, “Michael L. Coats—NASA, Johnson Space Center,” Diversity Journal, March 12, 2012, https://diversityjournal.com/7663-michael-l-coats-nasa-johnson-space-center/.

  8 David Thomas and Robin Ely, “Making Differences Matter: A New Paradigm for Managing Diversity,” Harvard Business Review 74, no. 5 (1996): 79–90.

  9 Robin J. Ely and David A. Thomas, “Getting Serious About Diversity: Enough Already with the Business Case,” Harvard Business Review 98, no. 6 (2020): 114–22.

  10 See Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (New York: Knopf, 2013).

  11 Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Men and Women of the Corporation (New York: Basic Books, 2010).

  12 For more on the cultural contingency of tokenism, see Catherine J. Turco, “Cultural Foundations of Tokenism: Evidence from the Leveraged Buyout Industry,” American Sociological Review 75, no. 6 (2010): 894–913.

  13 Alicia DeSantola, Lakshmi Ramarajan, and Julie Battilana, “New Venture Milestones and the First Female Board Member,” Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings (2017).

  14 Carolyn Wiley and Mireia Monllor-Tormos, “Board Gender Diversity in the STEM&F Sectors: The Critical Mass Required to Drive Firm Performance,” Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies 25, no. 3 (2018): 290–308.

  15 Alexandra Kalev, Frank Dobbin, and Erin Kelly, “Best Practices or Best Guesses? Assessing the Efficacy of Corporate Affirmative Action and Diversity Policies,” American Sociological Review 71, no. 4 (2006): 589–617.

  16 Emilio J. Castilla and Stephen Benard, “The Paradox of Meritocracy in Organizations,” Administrative Science Quarterly 55, no. 4 (2010): 543–76. For more on how diversity programs, when misused, can undermine racial justice, see Ellen Berrey, The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

  17 Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev, “Why Doesn’t Diversity Training Work? The Challenge for Industry and Academia,” Anthropology Now 10, no. 2 (2018): 48–55; Alexandra Kalev and Frank Dobbin, “Companies Need to Think Bigger Than Diversity Training,” Harvard Business Review (October 20, 2020), https://hbr.org/2020/10/companies-need-to-think-bigger-than-diversity-training.

  18 Iris Bohnet, What Works: Gender Equality by Design (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018); Colleen Ammerman and Boris Groysberg, Glass Half-Broken: Shattering the Barriers That Still Hold Women Back at Work (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021).

  19 Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev, “Why Diversity Programs Fail,” Harvard Business Review (2016), https://hbr.org/2016/07/why-diversity-programs-fail; see also Kalev and Dobbin, “Companies Need to Think Bigger.”

  20 Robert Livingston, “How to Promote Racial Equity in the Workplace,” Harvard Business Review 98, no. 5 (2020): 64–72; see also Robert Livingston, The Conversation: How Seeking and Speaking the Truth About Racism Can Radically Transform Individuals and Organizations (New York: Currency, 2021).

  21 Tina Opie and Laura Morgan Roberts, “Do Black Lives Really Matter in the Workplace? Restorative Justice as a Means to Reclaim Humanity,” Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal 36, no. 8 (2017): 707–19.

  22 For more on racial labor market discrimination, see Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal: A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination,” The American Economic Review 94, no. 4 (2004): 991–1013; Devah Pager, Bart Bonikowski, and Bruce Western, “Discrimination in a Low-Wage Labor Market,” American Sociological Review 74, no. 5 (2009): 777–99.

  23 Lauren A. Rivera, “Go with Your Gut: Emotion and Evaluation in Job Interviews,” American Journal of Sociology 120, no. 5 (2015): 1139–89; and Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). See also Gardiner Morse, “Designing a Bias-Free Organization,” Harvard Business Review 94, no. 7–8 (2016): 62–7.

  24 Laura Morgan Roberts and Anthony J. Mayo, “Toward a Racially Just Workplace,” Harvard Business Review, November 14, 2019, https://hbr.org/2019/11/toward-a-racially-just-workplace. See also Laura Morgan Roberts, Anthony J. Mayo, and David A. Thomas, Race, Work, and Leadership (La Vergne: Harvard Business Review Press, 2019).

  25 Colleen Sheppard, Inclusive Equality: The Relational Dimensions of Systemic Discrimination in Canada (Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2010).

  26 Livingston, “How to Promote Racial Equity in the Workplace”; Livingston, The Conversation.

  27 Franklin A. Gevurtz, “The Historical and Political Origins of the Corporate Board of Directors,” Hofstra Law Review 33, no. 1 (2004); Cyril O’Donnell, “Origins of the Corporate Executive,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society 26, no. 2 (1952): 55–72.

  28 Richard Mulgan, Holding Power to Account: Accoun
tability in Modern Democracies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

  29 Steven Boivie et al., “Are Boards Designed to Fail? The Implausibility of Effective Board Monitoring,” Academy of Management Annals 10, no. 1 (2016): 319–407.

  30 Michael Useem, The Inner Circle: Large Corporations and the Rise of Business Political Activity in the U.S. and U.K. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Mark Mizruchi, The American Corporate Network (Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE, 1982).

  31 Gerald F. Davis, Mina Yoo, and Wayne E. Baker, “The Small World of the American Corporate Elite, 1982–2001,” Strategic Organization 1, no. 3 (2003): 301–26.

  32 Johan S. G. Chu and Gerald F. Davis, “Who Killed the Inner Circle? The Decline of the American Corporate Interlock Network,” American Journal of Sociology 122, no. 3 (2016): 714–54.

  33 Traditionally, directors have an obligation to act in the best interest of the shareholders. This is their fiduciary duty to shareholders. For more, see Leo Strine, “The Dangers of Denial: The Need for a Clear-Eyed Understanding of the Power and Accountability Structure Established by the Delaware General Corporation Law,” SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 2576389, Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2576389.

  34 Lawrence Mishel and Jori Kandra, “CEO Compensation Surged 14% in 2019 to $21.3 Million: CEOs Now Earn 320 Times as Much as a Typical Worker,” Economic Policy Institute (blog), August 18, 2020, https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-surged-14-in-2019-to-21-3-million-ceos-now-earn-320-times-as-much-as-a-typical-worker/.

  35 Rebecca Henderson, Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire (New York: PublicAffairs, 2020); Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).

  36 Sarah Kaplan, The 360° Corporation: From Stakeholder Trade-Offs to Transformation (Stanford, CA: Stanford Business Books, 2019); R. Edward Freeman, Kristen Martin, and Bidhan L. Parmar, The Power of And: Responsible Business Without Trade-Offs (New York: Columbia Business School Publishing, 2020). See also Mariana Mazzucato, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism (Harper Business, 2021).