Once again, I used my job's learning and development stipend to purchase some books. The second I finished in 2026 is Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States by Albert O. Hirschman.

Economists traditionally model dissatisfaction by presuming that people simple leave: stop buying a company's low-quality products, quit your job, move. Hirschman calls this exit, and starts from the observation that this traditional modeling is insufficient. People often can, instead of leaving, agitate to improve their conditions, which he terms voice.

This might seem obvious, but remember, we're talking about traditional macroeconomists. In their view, the only transactional question is whether a consumer buys a widget, and furthermore, this decision is only driven by the widget's price. What the consumer might do if she notices a drop in widget quality - or even the idea that widgets have quality that can change over time - is not, apparently, economically legible. So Hirschman spends the first part of the book translating these intuitive folk ideas into what I presume is the language of economists. While this felt targeted to an audience I'm not a member of, it wasn't any more technically complicated than I remember my high school macroeconomics class being, and Hirschman did make some interesting comparisons between cost-demand curves and quality-demand curves, both in terms of their marginal behavior and in how they're variously associated with different strata of quality and consumer preferences. (For example, consumers of luxury goods are far more quality-sensitive than price-sensitive, and are more likely to respond to drops by complaining to the manufacturer than simply taking their business elsewhere.)

Things start to get interesting when he explores the organizational impact of marginal exit and marginal voice. (An "organization" could be a company that sells consumer goods, but also something like a trade organization or a political party.) For example, consider a manufacturer that changes its manufacturing process in a way that drastically reduces the quality of the product it sells. If its buyers immediately all switch to a competitor, the company will likely die; but if there is no signal to the company that something is wrong, the problem remains invisible. A more survivable signal could be a small customer exodus, or customers publicly expressing their disapproval (without withdrawing their business), or both - but for any of these to help, the manufacturer must be able to receive and act upon these less catastrophic signals.

Conversely, organizations can also affect their members' choices between voice and exit. For example, a manufacturer could solicit and facilitate customer feedback (enabling voice), or an employer could more aggressively require and enforce non-compete agreements (suppressing exit). (In traditional economist style, the discursive space contains no dimensions that could represent anything like ethics or morality, although Hirschman does claim that "totalitarian" organizations that fully suppress both voice and exit are ultimately doomed by rigidity.)

Hirschman ends up arguing that organizations, depending on their type, have varying structural sensitivity to both voice and exit, as well as varying responsiveness to each of them, and that long-term organizational health requires calibrating the two: You must be able to hear and respond to what matters. A seller of commodity goods must know immediately when sales have dropped, because its customers won't speak up before departure; conversely, a church (which is very socially difficult to leave) must adeptly solicit and act upon internal feedback. Warnings that cannot be seen cannot be heeded. Conversely, organizations can also try to reduce their sensitivity to pressures they lack visibility into; for example, the seller of commodities could branch out into specialty goods, which would reduce its vulnerability to mass exit.

I had misunderstood this book when I purchased it. I thought it explored the individual decision between voice and exit, rather than organizational responses to them. (I also hadn't anticipated the economic framing.) However, I'm glad I read it. It wasn't the individual guide I expected, but I'll never turn down an opportunity to think about organizational dynamics.