Pierre-Yves Néron’s book, Seeing Like a Firm, is a much-anticipated contribution to the wide-ranging literature on the normative theory of the firm. This field—which spans political science, philosophy, economics, law, and business ethics—has grown in quality and stature over the past 20 years, due, in no small part, to Néron’s important work over this time. The book provides a fantastic and helpful restatement of his considered views on the topic, tied together by a novel overarching political theory of the firm. This theory can be summarized in two key claims: first, critically, that we should understand the firm as fundamentally conservative in its constitution; and second, prescriptively, that we ought to assess and reform the firm according to principles of relational egalitarianism.

Let’s begin with the critical point that we ought to understand the firm and its implicit morality (p. 22) as fundamentally conservative. This stands in contrast to managerial discourses around the firm that morally emphasize the pursuit of profit, the servicing of stakeholders, or the upholding of corporate social responsibility; it also differs from prominent academic theories that critique economic institutions based on their implicit commitments to efficiency and cooperation. On Néron’s account, by either lionizing or criticizing the firm in terms of its status as an economic or libertarian institution, these views miss something crucial about the hierarchies and inequalities that characterize intra-firm arrangements. Namely, that such features are not incidental to the firm but crucial parts of its governing ideology.

Néron’s point is comparable to what John Locke claimed about the family or what John Dewey claimed about education—that the received patriarchal and hierarchical understandings of these institutions align with broader monarchical and authoritarian commitments. For Néron, hierarchies within firms must be understood as part of a broader constellation of practices he associates with the rise of the “conservatism of commerce” that is based on the “enchantment of economic life” (p. 34) and an “aesthetics of inequality” (p. 35). What’s unique here is that while traditional political theories of the family and education celebrate their conservatism, mainstream approaches to the study of business organization go out of their way to present corporations as a part—perhaps the quintessential part—of a liberal political order. These theoretical maneuvers allow a collective myopia regarding how inequalities within the firm are interconnected with the valorization of inequality in society at large. Néron shows how foundational academic and popular works on corporate organization and business ethics, which claim that hierarchies are either chimeras or necessary evils, end up being cheerleaders for the “beauty of an inegalitarian order” (p. 27). In an age where corporate and financial celebrities, perceived by admirers as having almost supernatural talents, find themselves in the White House fighting culture wars over gender pronouns and national identity, Néron’s argument about the relationship between corporate hierarchies and conservatism has quite a bit of resonance.

Given this inherent conservatism, Néron argues that moral and political theories focusing on the liberties of economic participants or macroeconomic efficiency cannot fully reckon with the normative problems firms present. Admirable-seeming discourses about corporate social responsibility only reinforce this conservatism, Néron astutely notes, by extolling the corporate executive and their moral leadership. Instead, Néron adopts relational egalitarianism—the normative theory that holds that justice fundamentally requires equal social standing and relations among people—as the most appropriate theoretical framework for understanding the moral dimensions of the firm. This leads to normative arguments in favor of workplace democracy, delimiting CEO pay, and leveling economic hierarchies more generally.

Relational egalitarianism is attractive for Néron because it seems to reject inequalities as such, sidestepping liberalism’s concerns over whether inequalities are public or private in nature. Of course, determining what it means to relate as equals is a complicated task when we take institutional pluralism seriously, which Néron attempts to do. Given such pluralism, there will be many contexts in which a relational egalitarian may not object to local instances of hierarchy as long as some background conditions are satisfied that secure our civic equality. Think of Aristotle’s famous maxim of democratic equality, that men “rule and be ruled in turn”: people are still “ruling” others, but it is justified because of a background commitment to reciprocity. Relational egalitarian approaches, therefore, must determine the balance between a focus on local equality and general equalities of standing. When it comes to the firm, does relational egalitarianism require that hierarchies be totally leveled—that is, the abolition of bosses and management—or that they be rendered legitimate according to egalitarian standards?

We believe that Néron carves things at the joints more cleanly when he doesn’t demand complete and perpetual equal relations within the firm, but rather when he specifies background conditions: that workers join firms voluntarily, that they can leave the firm, that they are in democratic control of firm hierarchies, and that the authority they are subject to attaches to offices within the firm, not to specific people. These conditions ensure that institutional hierarchies within the firm do not extend beyond their bounds, which Néron refers to as “sphere differentiation” (pp. 109–110). What’s important here is that these are broadly procedural articulations of the relational egalitarian ideal with regard to firms. In any given instance within the firm, people might relate to one another on unequal terms, but this can be congruent with relational equality if the processes that constitute these inequalities embody or protect a broader equality of relations. On this view, institutions like workplace democracy and limits on pay scales are important for Néron, not just because they make things more proximately equal within the firm, but because the nature of firm hierarchy is so pervasive and intrusive—it “gets under our skin” (p. 125)—that it undermines the broader relations of equality in society that are relevant for egalitarian justice.

This book has many fascinating and subtle insights, which we cannot do justice to in this limited space. For the sake of this review, we will limit ourselves to two concerns about Néron’s overall argument. First, while we agree that critiquing the internal relationships of the firm is an important part of democratizing the economy, we wonder if Néron’s emphasis on this institutional element obscures other concerns about the procedural requisites of relational equality. That is, we wonder if Néron is perhaps “seeing like a workplace democrat” by focusing so much on making firm hierarchies legible that other economic challenges to democratic equality are obscured from vision. While his point about markets being tiny spots in a sea of corporate hierarchies is well-taken (p. 18), even his preferred egalitarian firms would still have to compete with other firms in the market and for the attention of sociopolitical systems. These pose their own vexing challenges to establishing relational equality. In this context, it is worth noting that although Néron has a chapter on corporate political activity—that is, the way firms relate to broader political and democratic processes—his intervention is quite out of step with that of the book. Where the rest of the book is largely critical of efficiency-minded critiques of the economy, here Néron spends the bulk of the chapter using such a framework (i.e., Joseph Heath’s Market Failures Approach) to discuss the normative limits on corporate political activity. It is worth noting that this chapter is based on an important article of Néron’s, but it is strange to see the democratic and egalitarian framework used for intra-firm inequality give way to an efficiency-minded approach when discussing the effect that firms have on broader democratic processes.

Second, we understand that Néron’s purpose is to open a theoretical space for workplace democracy rather than to describe how it can work. Still, given the emphasis he places upon it in challenging the conservatism of commerce, it is surprising that there is so little said about what workplace democracy actually looks like. For instance, must workplace democracy be a participatory democracy, or can it allow delegation and representation? Should workplace democracy be limited, in ways familiar to the constitutional limits of powers, out of respect for other concerns of relational equality, like protecting individuals’ autonomy from the tyranny of their coworkers, or their privacy in grievance resolutions, which would presumably require processes apart from formal channels of democratic control? What is required to ensure these democratic enterprises can be optimally capitalized? We worry that Néron combats the “aesthetics of inequality” with his own “aesthetics of equality,” and sometimes gives the technical and unromantic details short shrift.

One must also take seriously the possibility that many workers might not want to participate in the governance of their workplaces in deep or demanding ways. To give an example close to home, most professors hate participating in university and faculty governance and try to limit the amount of service and meetings they attend. This is remarkable given that professors are professional sit-and-talkers—and thus a group of people most likely to be actively interested in participation. One can imagine that many people will use their democratic workplace rights passively (much like shareholders do currently) to legitimize the hierarchies that Néron bemoans, in order to make time for other pursuits. This would still be, we think, a radical departure from the current status quo in favor of relational equality, but one that wouldn’t seem to have many of the formative and aesthetic qualities that Néron wants. It would entail fewer passionate floor-level meetings about the future of the firm and more box-ticking and ignoring emails pleading with people to vote.

Given this, our question isn’t just one of practical institutional design. In asking whether Néron’s argument demands a particularly participatory conception of workplace democracy, we are also asking whether it requires a type of illiberal perfectionism, forcing workers to be active in things where they’d rather be passive. Such an intensive workplace vision, in turn, might violate Néron’s voluntariness criterion, noted above, bringing the question back to whether we should be focusing on local equality or broader equality of social standing.