Exit, Voice, and Loyalty : Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States
Editorial Reviews
Review
John Kenneth Galbraith : This is a marvelously perceptive essay which illuminates some of the most interesting economic and social questions of our time. I have read it with enormous interest and admiration, and the further pleasure that one has in being with an author who can think things through.
Joseph Kraft : I read Exit, Voice, and Loyalty with absolute fascination and found that it pulled together, in organized form, many random glimmerings that I had previously understood only dimly
Kenneth J. Arrow : Professor Hirschman's small book is bursting with new ideas. The economist has typically assumed that dissatisfaction with an organization's product is met by withdrawal of demand, while the political scientist thinks rather of the protests possible within the organization. Hirschman argues that both processes are at work and demonstrates beautifully by analysis and example that their interaction has surprising implications, a theory that illuminates strikingly many important economic and political phenomena of the day. The whole argument is developed with an extraordinary richness of reference to many societies and cultures.
Stanley Hoffmann : There is, of course, no substitute for a mind as original, playful, subtle, and fresh as Hirschman's.
Joseph Kraft : I read Exit, Voice, and Loyalty with absolute fascination and found that it pulled together, in organized form, many random glimmerings that I had previously understood only dimly.
Book Description
An innovator in contemporary thought on economic and political development looks here at decline rather than growth. Albert O. Hirschman makes a basic distinction between alternative ways of reacting to deterioration in business firms and, in general, to dissatisfaction with organizations: one-exit-is for the member to quit the organization or for the customer to switch to the competing product, and the other-voice-is for members or customers to agitate and exert influence for change "from within."
The efficiency of the competitive mechanism, with its total reliance on exit, is questioned for certain important situations. As exit often undercuts voice while being unable to counteract decline, loyalty is seen in the function of retarding exit and of permitting voice to play its proper role.
The interplay of the three concepts turns out to illuminate a wide range of economic, social, and political phenomena. As the author states in the preface, "having found my own unifying way of looking at issues as diverse as competition and the two-party system, divorce and the American character, black power and the failure of 'unhappy' top officials to resign over Vietnam, I decided to let myself go a little."
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty : Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States,Albert O. Hirschman,Harvard University Press,0674276604,Business & Economics,Business / Economics / Finance,Business/Economics,Dissenters,Economics - General,Loyalty,Organizational Behavior,Organizational sociology,Business & Economics / Economics / General
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty : Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States
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