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Book Review: Elizabeth Anderson Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about it)

On being asked to write this review, I was immediately intrigued by the title of the book and the two propositions encased in it: the first that employers rule our lives through a special form of government, and the second that we don’t talk about it. I was keen to see what this provocation was all about given that the juxtaposition of these propositions was not immediately sensible to me either as a scholar or a citizen. On the one hand, the idea of employers ruling in some sovereign manner, while unpalatable, seemed empirically defensible given the still present realities of hierarchical bureaucracy as the dominant mode of large-scale organizing. On the other hand, claiming that this was not a matter subject to open discussion defied my own experience. It is not made clear who is included in the parenthetic ‘we’ of the book’s title, referring possibly either to the general public or to those people within the author’s disciplinary purview. What was clear though was that it entirely excluded the whole tradition of theorizing power in organization studies. We, in the sense of those involved in the discipline eponymous to this journal, have been talking about it quite a lot, tracing back to the seminal work of Max Weber, through to the broad influence of Michel Foucault and beyond. From this beginning, I was curious as to what new perspectives might be brought to bear by the book’s interdisciplinary ensemble of authors on matters on home ground to organization studies. My starting point in reviewing this book in this particular journal gives my commentary a special flavour, given that the book deals with issues of organizational power so foundational to our discipline. It does so, however, from quite different perspectives that are seemingly unaware of ours. That is not to say that the book is mono-disciplinary. Quite the contrary, by its very design it is very much the contrary. The main part of the book contains two essays written by Elizabeth Anderson, Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. These essays were originally presented at Princeton University in 2015 as part of the Tanner Lectures in Human Values. This is followed by four commentaries written respectively by David Bromwich (Professor of English at Yale), Tyler Cowen (Professor of Economics at George Mason University), Anne Hughes (retired Professor of Early Modern History from Keele University) and Niko Kolodny (Professor of Philosophy at the University of California Berkeley). The book ends with a final chapter where Anderson replies to the commentators. What this presents is a deliberately cross-disciplinary interrogation of the operation and effects of organizational and managerial power on the political realities of waged labour. 779795OSS0010.1177/0170840618779795Organization StudiesBook Reviews book-review2018