Abstract

"Territorializing the Corporate: Spatiality and Divisions of Public and Private"

Alina Utrata, University of Oxford (autrata27@gmail.com)

Over the past few decades, there have been numerous political exit projects emerging from Silicon Valley which have attempted to “exit” from the state or politics itself (Craib, 2022; Lynch, 2017; Steinberg et al, 2012; Utrata, 2023). These include libertarian charter cities, like Trump’s Freedom Cities, as well as data bunkers, sea-steading and outer space colonies. Proponents of these projects have often explicitly drawn on Albert Hirschman’s Exit, Voice and Loyalty, in which he argues that individuals unhappy with organizations’ behavior can either organize politically through exercising “voice” or leave through “exit.” However, in this paper, I will argue that what it means conceptually to “exit” either a state or a corporation is much more complex than it at first appears. In both Hirschman’s text and in these political projects, we can see that exit is not commensurate with merely physically leaving a state’s territorial borders nor quitting a company’s workforce. I will explore how thinking through the concept of “exit” complicates how we should understand “voice,” or the boundary problem in the construction of the demos. While this has implications for debates in constructing the demos of the state (Abizadeh, 2008, 2012; Goodin, 2016, 2007; Näsström, 2007; Song, 2012; Whelan, 1983), it also has implications for the corporate demos (Stehr, 2023; González-Ricoy, 2014) and—I will argue—takes us firmly beyond workplace democracy debates (Anderson, 2017; Cockburn and Preminger, 2023; Cohen, 1989; Ferreras 2017; Landemore and Ferreras, 2017). While we have come to increasingly see private cities as uniquely illegitimate or beyond the bounds of acceptable politics, I instead argue that we should insist that all forms of corporations (whether explicitly territorial or not) should be treated as public, democratic entities.