Voting for Your Boss: An Economic Argument for Workplace Democracy

Social reformers such as John Stuart Mill and John Dewey have long expressed concern about a tension between democratic principles and organizational practices that appear undemocratic.' More recently, a substantial body of academic literature advocating changes in organizations to make them more democratic has been produced.2 Change has been advocated on a variety of normative grounds. In a noteworthy recent contribution to the genre for instance, political scientist Ian Shapiro argues that justice rightly understood is inseparable from democracy, and argues that management should be required to justify the business necessity of hierarchical, undemocratic practices, much as it is currently required to demonstrate the business necessity of practices with a racially disparate impact. 3