Against voice: towards organizational democracy

The concept of employee voice is currently enjoying a period of great popularity and is the subject of a great deal of academic writing and debate. During the 1980’s voice became popular when companies recognised it as a mechanism to detect problems and conflicts at an early stage (Dundon and Gollan, 2007:1183). It has been suggested that voice mechanisms are an important way of ensuring employee commitment, and the term has also been linked to conceptions of industrial citizenship and employee rights (Wilkinson et al. 2004:299). Over the last twenty years, there has been a significant decline in writing about employee participation and organisational democracy, and a steady increase in papers on employee voice. This paper will argue that although employee voice is clearly the preferred contemporary term for concepts that have been previously referred to as participation, involvement and even empowerment, the concept of voice should be challenged rather than embraced by critical management scholars. It is suggested that voice should not be viewed as a new management (and academic) fad, or simply as a ‘rebranding’ of other theoretical concepts, but as a dilution of, and an attack upon, more radical conceptions of participation at work.