Néron, P.-Y. (2023). Seeing Like a Firm: Social Equality, Conservatism, and the Aesthetics of Inequality. In J. D. Jonker & G. J. Rozeboom (Eds.), Working as equals relational egalitarianism and the workplace. essay, Oxford University Press.

To think about the prospects for building more egalitarian relationships in the workplace, as advocates of relational egalitarianism do, we need to think in reverse. We need to take seriously conceptions of the corporation that tend to erase the importance of social equality and instead praise workplace hierarchies. Yet, from a normative perspective, the emphasis on hierarchies is usually justified on utilitarian or libertarian grounds. Moreover, and more generally, in our ways of thinking normatively about economic institutions, we tend to use libertarianism to make theoretical sense of right-wing intuitions, which goes with the use of a certain kind of normative vocabulary, centered on notions of private property, self-ownership, voluntariness, etc. This chapter argues that that is misleading. To put it plainly, the way that the corporation “sees” is probably more a conservative one than a libertarian one, strictly speaking. To normatively unveil what it means to “see” like a firm, we need to move from a focus on libertarianism to a focus on conservatism.