Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States
By Albert O. Hirschman (Harvard University Press, 1970).
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty — a book you won’t be able to get out of your head — was written by Albert Hirschman, a political economist and total mensch (read his obituary in the December 23, 2012, New York Times). I find his framework to be immensely useful in thinking about schools.
The core argument is that political and economic organizations are responsive to different kinds of customer feedback. Political organizations respond to voice, in which dissatisfied actors mobilize their voices inside the organization to snap it into shape. Economic organizations respond to exit, in which unhappy customers stop buying one product and change to another.
Schools find themselves in an unhappy middle ground. They are political institutions, so they are vulnerable to voice, but the response they spur is exit. For advantaged consumers who are unhappy with their school, the easiest option is not to stay and fight for change but simply to exit to a private school or another school district (fight is harder than flight). Exit solves the issue for the unhappy customer but leaves the school and its remaining students worse off. It fixes one family’s private-good problem (getting a better education for their child) at the expense of the public good (by undercutting the education of other people’s children).
David Labaree’s latest in Kappan
- The dynamic tension at the core of the grammar of schooling
- Two cheers for school bureaucracy
- Public schools for private gain: The declining American commitment to serving the public good
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David F. Labaree
David F. Labaree is Lee L. Jacks Professor of Education, emeritus, at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education in Palo Alto, Calif. He is the author, most recently, of A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education.
