Varieties of Firm Republicanism: Institutional Models of Workplace Governance

Recent scholarship treats the firm as a regime of power in which workers are subject to arrangements analogous to those between state and citizen. Republican political theory is influential within these debates, identifying domination, the exposure to arbitrary power, as an obstacle to equal dignity and rights within firms. This article develops a new framework for understanding republican approaches to firm governance. It identifies three models: the regulatory-consultative model, which constrains managerial supervision; the workplace-democracy model, which addresses exclusion from governance; and the worker-ownership model, which treats ownership rights as the central source of domination. The article establishes the first systematic typology of republican institutional responses to domination in the firm and develops a configurational approach to their application. Rather than treating these models as rival blueprints or requiring their simultaneous application, it argues that the appropriate institutional response depends on the setting in which domination takes shape. This offers a new way of thinking about how relations of equal dignity and rights can be secured within firms.