Between Authority and Domination:Taming the Managerial Prerogative
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Can republican freedom as non-domination be reconciled with personal work relations in capitalist firms? This fundamental question has been central to recent scholarship at the intersection of law and political philosophy, such as Elizabeth Anderson's 'private government' critique. We argue that such a reconciliation is both possible and desirable. It depends upon a range of restrictions on managerial discretion, effective rights of exit for workers, and institutions of contestatory voice. Its achievement would require significant reform of existing labor law regimes in the US, the UK, and Canada. The focus of this article is on the justification and scope of managerial authority. Managers’ 'legitimate economic authority' in firms can be justified by considerations of expertise, coordination, and the broader economic benefits to be achieved through hierarchical organisation. The resulting risks of interpersonal and organizational domination must be mitigated in a variety of ways, including both effective exit options and mandatory labor standards. For the large scope of discretion that remains, the article provides a typology of discretion-constraining norms that range from unfettered discretion through to stringent requirements of affirmative justification to an external court or tribunal; and it proceeds to analyse which sorts of constraints should apply to various managerial decisions. The article concludes with a call to tame, not abolish, the managerial prerogative. Legitimate economic authority is always a concession of the state. Its limits are set by law and democratic decision. The task for neo-republican labour law is to circumscribe legitimate economic authority so that subordination of workers is kept within tolerable limits. This provides the basis for reconciling capitalism and republican freedom in the workplace.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.091 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".