Abstract
Scholars have long been interested in the capacity of employees to raise concerns and suggest improvements at work as well as the process through which they do so. The term ‘voice’ has gained popularity in recent decades to analyse the processes through which employees raise concerns, especially in light of the changing employment landscape. In particular, the long-term decline in union membership has changed the forms through which employees articulate grievances, while the rise of human resource management has increased managerial emphasis on harnessing employee suggestions and input, as well as engaging employees as active workplace participants. Disciplines as diverse as economics, management, political science, labour process theory, psychology and organisational behaviour have studied voice. These disciplines offer different definitions of voice, or focus on similar concerns about empowerment, participation or engagement. In bringing together the insights of these different disciplinary perspectives, the Handbook of Research on Employee Voice makes a valuable and unique contribution by illustrating different aspects and uses of the term voice.
The book is divided into four sections. The first section focuses on perspectives and theories on voice, providing a useful overview of understandings and uses of the term from different theoretical and paradigmatic lenses. In particular, Kaufman’s chapter situates the origins of voice in the works of classical political economists Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill. In doing so, he acknowledges Albert Hirschmann’s role as the originator of the formal concept of voice and Freeman and Medoff’s contribution in applying the concept to employees, while also highlighting that the key tenants of the concept have their origins in broader, fundamental concerns about the position of labour in the workplace and in society. This is an important reminder as it shows that while the term ‘voice’ may have only been used since Hirschmann’s 1970 work, its concerns cannot be so easily dismissed as the latest academic or managerial fad.
The second section on actors in voice usefully highlights the changing role of different participants in the employment relationship, examining employers, line managers, unions, marginalised employees and civil society organisations. This is valuable for moving beyond the simple union or non-union voice dichotomy and presenting the key concerns of different actors. Of particular interest is the consideration of how the roles of these actors have changed over time and the recognition of new actors. In particular, Heery, Abbott and Williams’ chapter on civil society organisations considers their impact (and potential to impact) on employees’ working conditions through issue-based advocacy campaigns.
The third section charts the different forms of voice, analysing both ways that employees can articulate voice and the depth of that voice in the extent to which it is institutionalised across workplaces. In doing so, this section considers both the process of articulating voice and the outcomes it can engender, highlighting that sometimes the key concern for employees in trying to exercise voice is to create an ongoing and sustainable platform to keep raising and addressing issues and work related improvements.
The final section draws together different threads of research on voice. It considers factors that shape voice mechanisms and the exercise of voice such as regulation, geography and workplace size (by considering voice in the small to medium enterprise context). This section also examines the absence of voice, or employee silence, and highlights the underpinning unitarist bias in much research in this area. Many of these issues are mentioned as areas for future research in the excellent final chapter by Budd. He highlights the need to consider contexts in which there are no voice mechanisms, to develop a more nuanced understanding of silence, to expand on the role of new technology in voice, to consider the role of corporate governance in voice and to analyse the role of changing forms of regulation. Of particular interest was his suggestion to re-ground studies of voice in a broader consideration of the function of work as not only a means of subsistence but also social activity and site for psychological fulfilment. An understanding of the meaning employees attach to their work could provide important insights into the gaps of this collection and studies in voice more generally.
While I think the book as a whole provides solid theoretical underpinnings for future research on voice, there could have been more emphasis on the process through which employees articulate, or are unable to articulate voice. For me, it seemed there was too quick a jump between charting the presence and purpose of voice mechanisms, the concerns of different actors and then assuming that they would use certain mechanisms in predictable ways. This points to broader questions that I felt were left unanswered, particularly about the social constructions of voice. Additional insights could have been generated by including more sociological work around how voice is affected by the social norms of the workplace, considering the range of differences across contexts and how these could impact on voice.
In my own work on voice, I take a critical realist position to chart the power status of employees relative to managers and the contextual features of the workplace as fundamental to an understanding of voice. This approach brings a stronger focus on the process of exercising voice, which I see as embedded in context.
My work has examined how young students working in retail and hospitality respond to sexual harassment from customers. In my consideration, voice provides a useful concept for framing employees’ capacity to complain about sexual harassment from customers and the ways in which they do so. Sexual harassment is a particularly complex issue as it can be conceptualised both as an individual grievance, but also given its prevalence and the underlying issues that are thought to generate the problem, a systemic issue faced by multiple employees in the same workplace and industry.
In examining how employees respond to this issue and framing these responses in relation to voice, many questions arise. Is it voice if an employee mentions their experience to a manager but the manager fails to take action? Is it voice if an employee speaks directly to the offending customer and tells them their behaviour is unwanted and asks them to leave the premises? Is it voice if the employee tries to take control of the situation and asks a co-worker to intervene? In thinking these questions through, I came to classify voice as articulation of the problem to the manager, but given its ineffectual outcome, maybe a stronger definition would have been about whether employees were advocating for a policy change. Issues about informal voice, the role of customers in voice, the role of co-worker solidarity and what actions employees take in the absence of voice still need to be developed. These areas are largely missed in the Handbook of Research on Employee Voice, but future editions could fruitfully address these issues by focusing more on the role of context in the exercise of voice. Perhaps these issues are understudied because it involves treading new terrain to areas of work not normally studied. It seems there has been a focus on unionised sites, particularly manufacturing, to examine the exercise of voice. While there have been a few studies in retail and hospitality (e.g. Marchington and Suter 2013; Townsend et al., 2013), more studies of these areas would be fruitful. Retail and hospitality are key sites for studies of voice, given the vulnerability of many workers in these industries, facing low levels of unionisation, low pay and precarious employment conditions. To better ground voice in the empirical reality, there needs to be more focus on different workplace contexts and how the features and norms underpinning employment relations in different industries impact on the structure of voice and process of articulating it.
Overall, the handbook provides an excellent understanding of the institutional and structural characteristics of employee voice, particularly focused on employment relations. It will be a valuable resource for scholars, students and practitioners to help understand both the theoretical groundings of voice and the structures through which it operates. Future editions of this handbook could gainfully expand on some of the issues charted in the final chapter, which left very interesting food for thought. Furthermore, future editions could also pick up on more sociological work around voice and the social norms in which it is embedded to analyse the process of exercising voice in a more nuanced way. Nevertheless, the handbook provides illuminating insights into the way voice is conceptualised across different disciplines and the forms, actors and outcomes considered by scholars studying these areas.