Employee Voice Before Hirschman : Its Early History, Conceptualization, and Practice

A person reading the scholarly employee voice literature could easily conclude the subject did not exist before Albert Hirschman wrote Exit, Voice and Loyalty (1970). His book is repeatedly cited as the root stem of the field, with the implication no one before him had given serious consideration to the idea. A Google search on the term “voice” reveals in a matter of seconds, however, that here is a serious case of historical myopia. Yes, Hirschman deserves credit for being the first to develop a formal theory of voice, albeit limited to people in their role as consumers in product markets. Accordingly, Freeman and Medoff (1984) also deserve credit because they were the first to take Hirschman’s theoretical ideas and apply them to employees in labor markets. Unacknowledged and unrecognized, however, is a long train of writing on employee voice that predates Hirschman and Freeman and Medoff by a century and more