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A Deliberative Case for Democracy in Firms

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Abstract

The increasing centrality of business firms in contemporary societies calls for a renewed attention to the democratization of these actors. This paper sheds new light on the possibility of democratizing business firms by bridging recent scholarship in two fields—deliberative democracy and business ethics. To date, deliberative democracy has largely neglected the role of business firms in democratic societies. While business ethics scholarship has given more attention to these issues, it has overlooked the possibility of deliberation within firms. As argued in the paper, a combination of reforms based on the ideas of workplace deliberation and business deliberation is necessary in order to promote the prospect of deliberation in different business contexts. The paper also discusses the importance of more democratic firms for deliberative democracy at large and, in particular, for the recent debate on deliberative systems. Finally, the paper suggests new areas of investigation to better understand the prospect of democratic deliberation in business firms.

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Notes

  1. Thus, the focus of this paper is on business organizations that are conceptually and empirically distinct from the market. In order to grasp the political role of the former we should not conflate it with the latter (Néron 2010).

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to my former colleagues at the Hoover Chair of Social and Economic Ethics, Catholic University of Louvain, for their precious help in reflecting upon workplace democracy. Thanks to the participants to the online workshop ‘Power and Deliberation in the Workplace', organized by the Hoover Chair, for the very stimulating feedback and discussion. I would like to thank Sasha Lipton Galbraith for her helpful comments and precious assistance with editing. Thanks to Jonathan Kuyper also provided insightful remarks on an earlier version of this paper. Finally, I am indebted to the anonymous reviewers for their prompt and very helpful observations. Of course, the standard disclaimer applies to this paper: any possible error, omission, and shortcoming are mine.

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    Andrea Felicetti

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Felicetti, A. A Deliberative Case for Democracy in Firms. J Bus Ethics 150, 803–814 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-016-3212-9

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