Power, for All

by Julie Battilana

  37 Tyler Wry, Kevin Chuah, and Michael Useem, Rigidity and Reversion: Why the Business Roundtable Faltered in the Face of COVID (Wharton School Working Paper, 2021).

  38 Alnoor Ebrahim, Julie Battilana, and Johanna Mair, “The Governance of Social Enterprises: Mission Drift and Accountability Challenges in Hybrid Organizations,” Research in Organizational Behavior 34 (2014): 81–100; Julie Battilana et al., “Beyond Shareholder Value Maximization: Accounting for Financial/Social Tradeoffs in Dual Purpose Companies,” The Academy of Management Review, in press; Alnoor Ebrahim, Measuring Social Change: Performance and Accountability in a Complex World (Redwood City: Stanford Business Books, 2019).

  39 Julie Battilana, Anne-Claire Pache, Metin Sengul, and Marissa Kimsey, “The Dual-Purpose Playbook,” Harvard Business Review 97, no. 4 (2019): 124–33; Julie Battilana, “Cracking the Organizational Challenge of Pursuing Joint Social and Financial Goals: Social Enterprise as a Laboratory to Understand Hybrid Organizing,” M@n@gment 21, no. 4 (2018): 1278–305; Ebrahim, Battilana, and Mair, “The Governance of Social Enterprises.”

  40 Chris Marquis, Better Business: How the B Corp Movement is Remaking Capitalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020).

  41 Cornelia Caseau and Gilles Grolleau, “Impact Investing: Killing Two Birds with One Stone?” Financial Analysts Journal 76, no. 4 (2020): 40–52; Abhilash Mudaliar and Hannah Dithrich, “Sizing the Impact Investing Market,” Global Impact Investing Network, April 2019, https://thegiin.org/assets/Sizing%20the%20Impact%20Investing%20Market_webfile.pdf; Global Impact Investing Network, “Annual Impact Investor Survey 2020,” 10th ed., June 2020, https://thegiin.org/assets/GIIN%20Annual%20Impact%20Investor%20Survey%202020.pdf.

  42 Isabelle Ferreras, Firms as Political Entities: Saving Democracy through Economic Bicameralism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

  43 Elizabeth Anderson, “How Bosses Are (Literally) like Dictators,” Vox, July 17, 2017, https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/7/17/15973478/bosses-dictators-workplace-rights-free-markets-unions; see also Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 39.

  44 Isabelle Ferreras, Julie Battilana, and Dominique Méda, Le Manifeste Travail: Démocratiser, Démarchandiser, Dépolluer (Paris: Le Seuil, Paris; forthcoming in English, University of Chicago Press, 2022); Gerald Davis, “Corporate Purpose Needs Democracy,” Journal of Management Studies (2020).

  45 International Labor Organization, “Who Are Domestic Workers,” International Labour Organization, accessed April 7, 2021, https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/domestic-workers/who/lang--en/index.htm.

  46 Palak Shah in discussion with the authors, April and September 2019.

  47 Robert Reich, “Almost 80% of U.S. Workers Live from Paycheck to Paycheck. Here’s Why,” The Guardian, July 29, 2018, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/29/us-economy-workers-paycheck-robert-reich.

  48 “Union Membership (Annual) News Release,” January 22, 2021, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.htm#; Matthew Walters and Lawrence Mishel, “How Unions Help All Workers,” Economic Policy Institute, August 26, 2003, https://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp143/. For an analysis of the global evidence from over three hundred studies on the economic impact of unionization, see Hristos Doucouliagos, Richard B. Freeman, and Patrice Laroche, The Economics of Trade Unions: A Study of a Research Field and Its Findings (Abingdon-on-Thames: Taylor & Francis, 2017).

  49 ILO, Domestic Workers across the World: Global and Regional Statistics and the Extent of Legal Protection (Geneva: ILO, 2013).

  50 Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality, 1st ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012); Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini, “Is Inequality Harmful for Growth? Theory and Evidence,” American Economic Review 84, no. 3 (1994): 600–21.

  51 Ai-jen Poo in discussion with the authors, October 2019.

  52 Lauren Hilgers, “The New Labor Movement Fighting for Domestic Workers’ Rights,” New York Times, February 21, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/21/magazine/national-domestic-workers-alliance.html.

  53 Alexia Fernández Campbell, “The Worldwide Uber Strike Is a Key Test for the Gig Economy,” Vox, May 8, 2019, https://www.vox.com/2019/5/8/18535367/uber-drivers-strike-2019-cities.

  54 For more data on electricity co-ops in the United States, see the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association’s fact sheet at: https://www.electric.coop/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Co-op-Facts-and-Figures.pdf.

  55 Juliet Shor, After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How To Win It Back (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020).

  56 “What’s American for Mitbestimmung?: Most of the World Has Yet to Embrace Co-determination,” The Economist, February 1, 2020, https://www.economist.com/business/2020/02/01/most-of-the-world-has-yet-to-embrace-co-determination.

  57 John Addison, The Economics of Codetermination: Lessons from the German Experience (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2009).

  58 Isabelle Ferreras, Firms as Political Entities.

  59 Isabelle Ferreras, Julie Battilana, and Dominique Méda, “Let’s Democratize and Decommodify Work,” The Boston Globe, May 2020. The publication was reprinted in more than forty other newspapers in thirty-six countries across the world. It led to the launching of an initiative (www.democratizingwork.org) and to the writing of a book, Ferreras, Battilana, and Méda, Le Manifeste Travail.

  60 Julie Battilana et al., “Harnessing Productive Tensions in Hybrid Organizations: The Case of Work Integration Social Enterprises,” Academy of Management Journal 58, no. 6 (2015): 1658–85; Battilana et al., “The Dual-Purpose Playbook”; Sophie Bacq, Julie Battilana, and Hélène Bovais, “The Role of Collegial Governance in Sustaining the Organizational Pursuit of Hybrid Goals,” Working Paper, 2020; Battilana, “Cracking the Organizational Challenge.”

  61 Julie Battilana, Michael Fuerstein, and Mike Lee, “New Prospects for Organizational Democracy? How the Joint Pursuit of Social and Financial Goals Challenges Traditional Organizational Designs,” in Capitalism Beyond Mutuality?: Perspectives Integrating Philosophy and Social Science, ed. Subramanian Rangan (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018).

  62 Battilana, Fuerstein, and Lee, “New Prospects for Organizational Democracy?”

  63 Sviatoslav Dmitriev, The Birth of the Athenian Community: From Solon to Cleisthenes (Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2018). There is some controversy over whether Cleisthenes himself used the term demokratia to describe his new system, with some instead describing it with the term isonomia, meaning roughly “equality before the law.” See Raphael Sealey, “The Origins of ‘Demokratia,’ ” California Studies in Classical Antiquity 6 (1974): 253.

  64 David Stockton, The Classical Athenian Democracy (Oxford University Press, 1990); George Tridimas, “A Political Economy Perspective of Direct Democracy in Ancient Athens?” Constitutional Political Economy 22, no. 1 (2011): 58–82.

  65 Ian Worthington, Demosthenes of Athens and the Fall of Classical Greece (Oxford University Press, 2012).

  66 Charles de Secondat Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Anne Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Stone (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 155.

  67 Hilary Bok, “Baron de Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford University, 2018).

  68 For the full report, see Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz, Freedom in the World 2021: Democracy Under Siege (Washington, DC: Freedom House, 2021).

  69 The many sources on this topic include: Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018); Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017); Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2018).

  70 Snyder, On Tyranny, 24.

  71
Tope Ogundipe in discussion with the authors, July 2019.

  72 PEN International et al., Open Letter to the Nigerian Senate on the Matter of the Frivolous Petitions Prohibition Bill (aka “Social Media” Bill), accessed February 26, 2021, https://pen-international.org/print/3985.

  73 Segun Olaniyi, “Senate Throws Out Frivolous Petitions Bill,” The Guardian Nigeria, May 18, 2016, https://guardian.ng/news/senate-throws-out-frivolous-petitions-bill/.

  74 The French historian and sociologist Pierre Rosanvallon identifies the importance of civic counterpowers in bridging the preferences of citizens with the actions of representatives on a more regular basis than voting permits. See Pierre Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

  75 Joshua Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” in D. Estlund, ed., Democracy (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002); Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

  76 Cornel West, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (New York: Penguin, 2005): 41.

  77 Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988).

  78 Tawakkol Karman in discussion with the authors, April 2020.

  79 Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson say: “Without society’s vigilance, constitutions and guarantees are not worth much more than the parchment they are written on.” See Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty (New York: Penguin Books, 2019), xvi.

  80 Danielle Allen, Education and Equality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 27.

  81 Danielle Allen, Stephen B. Heintz, and Eric P. Liu, Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2020).

  82 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 40. See also Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), trans. Myra B. Ramos (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012).

  83 Lene Rachel Andersen and Tomas Björkman, The Nordic Secret (Stockholm: Fri Tanke, 2017).

  84 As Andersen and Björkman detail in The Nordic Secret, Bildung finds its roots primarily in Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy of aesthetic expression and the romanticism of Pestalozzi’s pedagogy of ego-development. Subsequent models also see personal and moral development as progressing in stages of increasing mental complexity, most prominently the developmental psychology of Robert Kegan (see Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982]).

  85 Lars Skov Henriksen, Kristin Strømsnes, and Lars Svedberg, eds., Civic Engagement in Scandinavia: Volunteering, Informal Help and Giving in Denmark, Norway and Sweden (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2018).

  86 Elizabeth Anderson, “The Epistemology of Democracy,” Episteme 3, no. 1–2 (2006): 8–22.

  87 James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Anchor Books, 2005); Hélène Landemore, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).

  88 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique (Paris: P. Pourrat Frères, 1839), 93. Translation our own.

  89 Julia Cagé, The Price of Democracy: How Money Shapes Politics and What to Do About It (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).

  90 Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States—and the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

  91 Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, “Wealth Inequality in the United States since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 131, no. 2 (2016): 519–78.

  92 Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).

  93 Point made by David Eaves in Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie, “Many Tech Experts Say Digital Disruption Will Hurt Democracy,” Pew Research Center, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/02/21/many-tech-experts-say-digital-disruption-will-hurt-democracy/.

  94 Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj, The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

  95 See Cass R. Sunstein, #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); Jacob L. Nelson and Harsh Taneja, “The Small, Disloyal Fake News Audience: The Role of Audience Availability in Fake News Consumption,” New Media & Society 20, no. 10 (2018): 3720–37; and for a review of the nuanced literature on social media and democracy: Joshua A. Tucker et al., “Social Media, Political Polarization, and Political Disinformation: A Review of the Scientific Literature,” Hewlett Foundation, March 2018, https://hewlett.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Social-Media-Political-Polarization-and-Political-Disinformation-Literature-Review.pdf.

  96 For guidance on overcoming these limitations and building a more democratic digital public sphere, see Joshua Cohen and Archon Fung, “Democracy and the Digital Public Sphere,” in Digital Technology and Democratic Theory, ed. Lucy Bernholz, Hélène Landemore, and Robert Reich (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).

  97 For more on potential barriers to full participation and how they might be alleviated, see Céline Braconnier, Jean-Yves Dormagen, and Vincent Pons, “Voter Registration Costs and Disenfranchisement: Experimental Evidence from France,” The American Political Science Review 111, no. 3 (2017): 584–604.

  98 For more on the difficulties inherent in implementing a full democracy, see Robert Dahl, “Procedural Democracy,” in Philosophy, Politics and Society, ed. Peter Laslett and Jim Fishkin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 97–133.

  99 LaTosha Brown in discussion with the authors, December 2019 and February 2021.

  100 Theda Skocpol and Morris P. Fiorina, Civic Engagement in American Democracy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999); Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003).

  101 For France, see the Citizen’s Convention on Climate, https://www.conventioncitoyennepourleclimat.fr/en/; For Vancouver, Canada see Edana Beauvais and Mark E. Warren, “What Can Deliberative Mini-Publics Contribute to Democratic Systems?” European Journal of Political Research 58, no. 3 (2019): 893–914; and for Ireland, see “Lessons from Ireland’s Recent Referendums: How Deliberation Helps Inform Voters,” British Politics and Policy at LSE, September 9, 2018.

  102 Carl Miller, “Taiwan Is Making Democracy Work Again. It’s Time We Paid Attention,” Wired UK, November 26, 2019, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/taiwan-democracy-social-media; Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev, “How to Put Out Democracy’s Dumpster Fire.” The Atlantic, March 8, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/the-internet-doesnt-have-to-be-awful/618079/.

  103 For details of every case, see vTaiwan’s website: https://info.vtaiwan.tw/#three.

  104 Hélène Landemore, Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).

  CONCLUSION: IT’S UP TO US

  1 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).

  2 For contemporary accounts and theories of justice that also provide an overview of past work, see Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009); Amartya Kumar Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Mathias Risse, On Global Justice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).

  3 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: T
he Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2nd Beacon Paperback ed. (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001).

  4 Michèle Lamont, “Addressing Recognition Gaps: Destigmatization and the Reduction of Inequality,” American Sociological Review 83, no. 3 (2018): 419-44.

  5 Michèle Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration, Revised edition (New York: Harvard University Press, 2002); Mark Carney, Value(s): Building a Better World for All (Penguin Random House of Canada, 2021).

  6 Lakshmi Ramarajan, “Past, Present and Future Research on Multiple Identities: Toward an Intrapersonal Network Approach,” Academy of Management Annals 8, no. 1 (2014): 589–659.

  7 Fabrizio Ferraro, Jeffrey Pfeffer, and Robert I. Sutton, “Economics Language and Assumptions: How Theories Can Become Self-Fulfilling,” Academy of Management Review 30, no. 1 (2005): 8–24; Michèle Lamont, “From ‘Having’ to ‘Being’: Self-Worth and the Current Crisis of American Society,” The British Journal of Sociology 70, no. 3: 660–707 and American Sociological Review 83, no. 3 (2018): 419–44.

  8 Elizabeth Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

  APPENDIX

  1 Max Weber, Economy and Society, eds. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

  2 Robert A. Dahl, “The Concept of Power,” Behavioral Science 2, no. 3 (1957): 201–15.

  3 Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, “Two Faces of Power,” American Political Science Review 56, no. 4 (1962): 47–952.

  4 Peter M. Blau, Exchange and Power in Social Life (New York: Wiley, 1964).

  5 Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1974).

  6 Gerald Salancik and Jeffrey Pfeffer, “Who Gets Power—And How They Hold on to It,” in The Management of Organizations: Strategies, Tactics, and Analyses, eds. M. Tushman, C. O’Reilly, and D. Nadler (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 268–284.