Firms as Political Entities

Isabelle Ferreras is a tenured fellow of the Belgian National Science Foundation, a professor of sociology at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium, and a senior research associate of the Labor and Worklife Program, Harvard Law School, Massachusetts. A sociologist and political scientist by training, she is driven by the idea that the social sciences can make a difference. This book is the keystone of her long-term research into the tensions between capitalism and democracy.

• Introduction: what about the workers?; Part I. Critical History of Power in the Firm: The Slow Transition of Work from the Private to the Public Sphere: 1. Stage one: the workplace and its emergence from the household; 2. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries: workers' movements and the invention of collective bargaining; 3. The twentieth century and the ambiguities of institutional innovations in the capitalist firm; 4. The twenty-first century service economy is bringing work fully into the public sphere; Part II. What Is a Firm?: 5. Obsolete vision: instrumental rationality as the firm's sole logic; 6. Foundations for the political theory of the firm; Part III. Looking to the Future: From Political Bicameralism to Economic Bicameralism: 7. Bicameral movements: a pivotal institutional innovation for governments in democratic transition; 8. Analogy: the executive of the firm answering to a two-chamber parliament; Conclusions: a reader's guide for reflection and debate about economic bicameralism.

'Isabelle Ferreras presents a forceful case for a very big idea. Firms, she argues, are political entities, and democracy is the right kind of governance for political entities. So firms should be governed democratically - by a bicameral body, representing workers as well as owners of capital. We urgently need creative, ambitious, constructive thinking, and Isabelle Ferreras delivers it: clearly, gracefully, and with great intellectual power.' Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, Apple University and University of California, Berkeley, Editor of the Boston Review and University of Wisconsin, Madison, Director, COWS