Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

Freedom? 185one proposes not to use the concept of freedom to analyzethe situation; the other chooses to use it.Either way, the enterprise is not an unrestrained tyranny,for management typically wants to limit its commandsto those necessary during working hours to organizeproduction. Management cannot ordinarily give orders toemployees—nor does it usually wish to—on their off hours.Yet evidence of invasions of freedom outside the workplacein industrialized societies ranges from managerial attemptsto compel employees to vote as management wishes, tocorporate controls, often subtle, over how their executivesdress, where they live, with whom they associate, and theirpolitics. In many parts of the world, managerial authoritarianismis still much like that in isolated mining towns,with their company stores and company housing.The main curb, of course, on managerial authority isthat employees, while agreeing to practice obedience tomanagement in return for a wage, can quit. How well thatconstrains management depends on what alternative jobsemployees can find. Governmental regulation of the workplacearises because that constraint is not sufficiently effective.In all market systems a weak but persistent demandfor worker participation in management attests to continueddiscontent with workplace authority. Sometimes it is astrong demand for “industrial democracy,” as, in one of itsforms, in German employee membership on supervisoryboards of enterprises.If competition for workers is vigorous enough, an employerwho commonly makes coercive demands will fail tohold employees. But it does not deny the coercion latentand often practiced in employer-employee interactions becauseemployers can selectively coerce—that is, can do to a