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

Hirschman · Voice & Silence · Harvard University Press · 1970 · Open access

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The book that put exit and voice into one framework, as the two ways a declining firm, organisation or state can be pulled back to health. Hirschman, an economist, argues that each discipline had seen half of the picture: economists recognised exit, the dissatisfied customer who switches, and neglected voice, while political scientists studied voice but treated the alternative to it as acquiescence rather than departure. Voice is any attempt to change, rather than to escape from, an objectionable state of affairs, graduated from faint grumbling to violent protest. Compared with exit it is costly, and it depends on the influence people expect to be able to bring to bear.

Two arguments carry the book for psychological safety. The presence of exit can tend to atrophy the development of the art of voice, because people ordinarily judge voice by its past cost and effectiveness when discovering cheaper and more effective ways to use it is its very essence. And those who care most about quality, who would be the most active, reliable and creative agents of voice, are apparently likely to be the first to leave, which paralyses voice by depriving it of its principal agents. The cases are the Nigerian railways, whose potentially most vocal customers left first for lorries, and public schools losing the most quality-conscious parents to private ones.

Loyalty holds exit at bay and activates voice, within limits; without it, exit is taken in silence. Prompted by Walzer, Hirschman observes that the greater the opportunities for exit, the easier organisations appear to find it to resist internal democracy, the justification being that anyone who dislikes it can leave. Organisations able to repress both exit and voice, such as gangs and totalitarian parties, largely deprive themselves of both routes to recovery. And management's short-run interest is to turn feedback into a safety valve: voice becomes blowing off steam once dissent is institutionalised, as James Thomson described in the Johnson administration, where a doubter cast as the official devil's advocate was heard periodically and so became discountable.

Limits: an essay argued by example and illustration rather than tested, unpremeditated by Hirschman's own account and grown from one paragraph about Nigerian railways. Its subjects are customers, members and citizens, and reading it onto employees is our application. The appendix on severe initiation, with Zimbardo and Snyder, is the design for an experiment, not a result.

Hirschman, A.O. (1970) Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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