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Review Article: ‘Exit, Voice, and Loyalty’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Brian Barry
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Extract

My primary purpose in this review is to provide a detailed critique of the internal logic of Albert O. Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Before doing this, however, I should like to consider briefly the phenomenon of which it is an exemplar: the ‘in’ book. For this raises some general questions of interest.

Type
Review Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , January 1974 , pp. 79 - 107
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974

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References

1 Hirschman, Albert O., Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970).Google Scholar

2 One result of the lack of this common professional range of reference in Britain is that practising politicians, in their relations with professional political scientists, are able to regard themselves not as the raw materials but the experts. The same phenomenon can, of course, be looked at the other way round and one can say that the unquestioned acceptance by many political scientists of the validity of the actor's point of view (which thus makes the politician's claim to expertise indefeasible) is one of the main inhibitions on the development of a distinctive discipline.

3 De Sola Price, D., Little Science, Big Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963).Google Scholar

4 One simple quantitative comparison is that APSA, with twenty times the membership of the PSA, has about forty times the number of papers at its annual convention, and this leaves out of account the annual meetings of the regional associations, each of which regularly has more papers presented than are given at the PSA conference.

5 Halsey, A. H. and Trow, M. A., The British Academics (London: Faber and Faber, 1971).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Shils, Edward, The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 152.Google Scholar

7 A helpful way to think about the relative effectiveness of different modes of communication in fostering the transmission of ideas might be in terms of ‘reaction time’. This we may define as the average amount of time that elapses from the time when A has a new idea until B has had an opportunity to react toA's idea and allow it to modify or inspire work which becomes available to A or some further person C. Consider first a system in which the prevailing mode of communication is the book. If it takes A an average of five years from conception to completion and another year to publication, and then an average of a couple of years before B hears about the book, we have a reaction time of fourteen years. In these circumstances slow theoretical development will hardly be surprising. A move to article publishing, as is now gradually taking place in Britain, cuts down the reaction time greatly, to perhaps four years — two years from inception to publication for A and B, and no intervening time provided B reads the journal A publishes in. But clearly the existence of a dense network of personal communications, face to face and by circulation of manuscripts, makes reaction times of a matter of months quite easy while the attainable minimum from A to B to C is a matter of a few seconds.

8 I am not here intending to echo Cornford's remark that ‘ “Sound scholar” is a term of praise applied to one another by learned men who have no reputation outside the University, and a rather queer one inside it.’ Microcosmographia Academica, 6th edn. (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1964), p. 19.Google Scholar

9 Wolf, Eric R., Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), p. 52;Google ScholarHuntington, Samuel P., Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 310–11.Google Scholar

10 Hirschman, , Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, pp. 60–1.Google Scholar

11 Huntington, , Political Order, p. 54.Google Scholar

12 Macdonald, J. S., ‘Agricultural Organization, Migration and Labour Militancy in Rural Italy’, Economic History Review, Second Series XVI (1963–1964), 61–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar I am indebted for the reference to an unpublished paper by Hirschman.

13 Matthews, Donald R. and Prothro, James W., Negroes and the New Southern Politics (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), pp. 449 and 450.Google Scholar

14 Orbell, John M. and Uno, Toro, ‘A Theory of Neighborhood Problem Solving: Political Actions vs. Residential Mobility’, American Political Science Review, LXVI (1972), 471–89, p. 484.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Huntington, , Political Order, p. 54.Google Scholar

16 Cultures which emphasize egalitarian values and the possibility of success for all, such as those of the United States and the Soviet Union, presumably expose ‘failures’ to greater problems of adjustment… Both 'transvaluational religion’ and ‘high aspirations for children' may be reviewed as a means of safeguarding society against instability. In America, for example, the depressed strata seem to have turned to evangelical religion rather than to radical politics; in Russia, where political protest is forbidden, there is also some evidence of a ‘return to religion’ among the poorer strata: and both societies — each in its own way — seem to place an extraordinarily high emphasis on a better life for children. It is in the societies of Europe and Asia where less emphasis is placed on equality of opportunity that left-wing political movements are strong among the lower strata — presumably because they teach that traditional inequalities can be done away with by changing the social system. Seymour Lipset, Martin and Bendix, Reinhard, Social Mobility in Industrial Society (London: Heinemann, 1959), pp. 262—3.Google Scholar Cf. Chinoy, Ely, Auto Workers and the American Dream (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1955).Google Scholar

17 Lipset, and Bendix, , Social Mobility, p. 263.Google Scholar

18 Sociologists, Economists and Democracy (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1970), p. 24Google Scholar, referring to Downs, Anthony, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957)Google Scholar and Olson, Mancur Jr., The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965).Google Scholar

19 All quotations with page references in this form are from Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.

20 Pizzorno, Allesandro, ‘Amoral Familism and Historical Marginality’, International Review of Community Development, XV (1966), 55–66Google Scholar, reprinted in Mattel Dogan and Richard Rose, eds., European Politics: a Reader (London: Macmillan, 1971), 87–98, p. 92. This point is, of course, relevant to the study of rural Italy mentioned earlier, and illustrates my remark that the connection between exit and absence of voice may not be that they are alternatives. It is surely plausible that the apparent impossibility of achieving much of an improvement in conditions even if voice were wildly successful in getting action would itself be a strong incentive to exit.

It is of fundamental importance to consider the fact that the whole world does not appear equally hopeless to the peasant. In fact, he applies this concept of inability solely to himself and to the environment in which he is living at the moment. He feels that he could improve his situation if he could find work in a northern factory or could emigrate to America.

Quoted by Pizzorno, in Dogan and Rose, European Politics, from Cancian, ‘II contadino meridionale: comportamento politico e visione del mondo’, Bollettino delle richerche sociali, October 1961, p. 269. An earlier exit available to peasants in some areas such as Lucania was to become brigands: this might be compared with the case mentioned earlier of Russian peasants becoming Cossacks. (See for example Levi, Carlo, Christ Stopped at Eboli (London: Cassell, 1948).Google Scholar) Becoming a bandit, as Hobsbawm points out, is almost always initially an exit phenomenon though the role may acquire secondary ‘voice’ aspects of the ‘Robin Hood’ variety: ‘The State shows an interest in a peasant because of some minor infraction of the law, and the man takes to the hills because how does he know what a system which does not know or understand peasants, and which peasants do not understand, will do to him?’ Hobsbawm, E. J., Primitive Rebels (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959), p. 16.Google Scholar

21 These points are treated more fully in the context of Downs’ and Olson's ‘economic’ explanations of political participation in Sociologists, Economists and Democracy, Chap. 2.

22 In putting forward this point I am aware of a debt to a stimulating paper delivered by Benjamin Barber at Oxford University in May 1973, though he cannot of course be held responsible for the use made here of his ideas.

23 The exception which Hirschman goes on, in the passage quoted, to allow to this ‘rule’ is not in fact an exception at all, because it does not require loyalty, defined as a reduction in the benefit derived from the best competing organization. He says: It is true that, in the face of discontent with the way things are going in an organization, an individual member can remain loyal without being influential himself, but hardly without the expectation that someone will act or something will happen to improve matters.’ (p. 78.) This is quite consistent with the ordinary calculus set out in the previous section, since the person in question expects the present product to improve so that it is once again the best buy. All we need is some once-forall cost of changing suppliers to prevent the person in question from exiting now and returning when things do get better again. (It is, of course, important to distinguish a cost of exit from a tax on the competing product, which is ‘loyalty’.) Conversely, if loyalty is a tax on the competing product then it is perfectly consistent with the model that someone should stay indefinitely with a firm or organization he believes to be inferior so long as the degree of inferiority is less than the ‘tariff barrier’ (an analogy Hirschman himself uses) represented by loyalty.

24 In some cases, however, the welfare of a collectivity can be advanced only by leaving it. Thus Irish or Pakistani emigrants are loyal to their family or village if they send back money from England or the USA.

25 Consider the bumper-sticker of a few years ago: ‘America — Love It or Leave It’. Presumably those who professed this sentiment regarded active opposition to the Vietnam war from within the USA as more ‘disloyal’ than mere exit.

26 One reader of an earlier draft has shrewdly observed that my opening remarks depend on the unstated assumption that the object of academic life is to maximize the advancement of the discipline and that most academics may prefer to use ‘organizational slack’ to grow roses, drink port, etc. I must confess to being guilty of the Puritan ethic in this one respect.

27 One might, however, still in general (that is, without regard to the pros and cons of the particular President's policies) be in favour of more disloyalty on condition that the main effect of disloyalty was not so much to make the President more responsive to his appointees as to make him more responsive to the Congress and the public at large. Watergate provides one example, where loyalty to the President meant engaging in subversion of the democratic process itself. In the long run, however, the more important question (raised above all by the Pentagon Papers) is whether the Presidency has broken free of the checks envisaged by the constitution, whether, by a systematic policy of concealment and lies about its actions and its intentions, it can operate without any effective scrutiny, debate or control by Congress and the public. To the extent that this is so – and the process seems to me far advanced, to say no more - the maximum disloyalty is to be welcomed, especially in the form of leaks about what is really going on. Evaluatively this differs from the Hirschman case in that the desired result is accountability to the consumers (or their representatives in Congress) rather than accountability to the producers (the Presidential appointees). It also differs in that it does not require the disloyalty to be motivated by disapproval of the President's policies themselves. It could in principle be motivated simply by a dislike of concealment and lies or a belief that they are incompatible with free or democratic institutions.

28 ‘Organizational slack’ in firms seems more likely to be deterred or corrected by (a) takeover bids by other firms, (b) state control, forced merger or nationalisation, or (c) more effective channels for employees to exert pressure on managers. None of these is considered by Hirschman.

29 From this perspective it is clear that Hirschman's own description of the theme in the Preface — ‘the failure to resign’ — is misleading. In the last few lines of the chapter he implicitly accepts that there were enough people who resigned over Vietnam, and that the problem was rather their failure to denounce it, when he refers to ‘the relief that would have been experienced if at least one of the public officials who “dropped out” of the Johnson administration over the Vietnam war had thereupon publicly fought official war policies’ (p. 105). Compare the following from Louis Heren, reflecting on the same period: ‘The responsibility for the war of course rested first with Kennedy and then with Johnson, but few of their advisers could see the madness of it. Fewer were prepared to tell their master, preferring instead to slink back to Harvard and other academic and foundation boltholes.’ Heren, Louis, ‘Pied Pipers at the White House’, The Times, 24 05 1973, p. 13.Google Scholar

30 The preference for risk would have to be high if we accept an assumption put forward a little earlier in the chapter. Hirschman states this in words as: ‘discontent rises more than proportionately with deviation of the actual from the preferred quality’ (pp. 63–4n.) but, as the accompanying figure shows, what he intends is that discontent is not linear with distance but is an increasing function of it. This entails that a person with a neutral attitude to risk given a choice between an outcome a certain distance X from his most preferred outcome and a lottery of (say) a ·5 chance of his preferred outcome and a ·5 chance of one at a distance of 2X would always choose the first alternative.

31 For further discussion of this matter, see my Sociologists, Economists and Democracy, pp. 149–50.

32 This, of course, presupposes that voice is inversely related to well-being. It seems plausible, however, that up to some threshold the struggle for existence is so grim as to leave no energy for voice. Thus in the nineteenth century the Irish peasantry were politically inert during the terrible years of famine but became much more active when things improved — to a considerable extent as a result of massive emigration.