We are grateful for Pierre-Yves Néron’s thoughtful and generous comments. We think there is much more agreement than not between our books, which differ more in emphasis and focus than in substantive commitment. Nonetheless, we do want to focus on what we view as a significant methodological difference that may explain the divergent trajectories that we take.

Néron notes that we “may underestimate the extent to which the firm’s very structure—its governance, incentives, and legal personhood—is designed to protect it from precisely the kind of democratic scrutiny the authors call for.” For Néron, the problem is that we don’t recognize that the firm is implicitly a conservative institution, whose inherent morality is grounded in preserving and sustaining inequality, both within the firm and in society at large. Calling for the firm to engage in ethical restraint and democratic concern, as we do, is like trying to house-train a wild animal—it is ostensibly doomed to fail because the creature we are trying to tame is fundamentally not fit for the house. Consequently, we are too mealy-mouthed for Néron when it comes to workplace democracy, which for him is an institutional prerequisite for democracy in society at large.

The question that foregrounds Néron’s inquiry is what firms are really like—that is, what is their “very structure.” We, in contrast, do not begin with a social ontology but rather with the practical question of which institutions a society needs to solve the problems it deems important. Because we take the idea of institutional pluralism as a social fact, our normative emphasis on democracy is on its ability to oversee and adjudicate this pluralistic approach to problem-solving, not to rule things out of bounds on categorical terms. We want democratic institutions to be able to experiment with and evaluate different institutional forms and thereby determine which ones are tamable.

We share Néron’s misgivings about contemporary corporate governance and the worry that its hierarchical structure undermines democracy. Furthermore, we are sympathetic to workplace democracy; this is part of why we emphasize its importance for a vibrant democratic culture. And yet, despite this sympathy, we don’t share his epistemic confidence in the singular democratic importance of institutionally reforming the firms’ hierarchy. Worker governance, focusing as it does on hierarchies within firms, does not institutionally address the power firms wield—politically, economically, and socially—over those outside the firm. We also wonder if insisting on the firm’s ontological conservatism is consistent with Néron’s normative emphasis on workplace democracy. If the firm is implicitly inegalitarian, democracy should demand its abolition. Calls to democratize the firm, like Néron’s, would seem like another errant attempt to democratically tame an undemocratic animal. That the firm can be democratically governed (in different ways and styles, given different industries and cultural contexts), we think, lends credence to our pragmatic inclinations in calling for what Néron describes as “democratic scrutiny.”