Begum Icelliler

• Dissertation: The Workplace and Democracy

The workplace is one of the most ubiquitous social institutions that we have. Most citizens interact with their fellow citizens in the economic realm more than they do in the political realm; they work more than they vote, protest, or deliberate. Given the centrality of work in the lives of citizens and the functioning of democracies, it is important to understand how work shapes political democracy and democratic principles bear on work.

Scholars have tended to understand the relationship between work and democracy in one of two ways. They have either argued that the economy should be governed democratically or that political democracy should be insulated from the market economy. The Workplace and Democracy aims to chart a third path. Its central claim is that who we are as democratic citizens is not independent from how we work. Work plays a central role in shaping who we are as citizens and does so in counterintuitive ways: not all non-hierarchical workplace relations are compatible with democratic citizenship, and hierarchical workplace relations can become compatible with democratic principles.

Each chapter explores the ways that the social relationships forged through workplace institutions and processes shape the core features of democratic citizenship, namely egalitarian relations, organizing capacity, and political agency. Throughout, I propose liberal policies for making work more compatible with democracy’s normative commitments. Ultimately, I maintain that a democracy compatible with equality and freedom requires treating the workplace as a site of civic formation essential to the well-functioning of a democratic polity.

• Icelliler, B. (2025). “The Necessity of Labor Unions for Curbing Domination”. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 1–23.

Ordinary citizens must act in concert to fight domination in their workplaces, but they face formidable barriers to their collective action. I argue that labor unions mitigate the collective action problems posed by capitalist labor markets by building collective power from the ground up and leveraging their distinct institutional capacity to lower the costs of collective action. Labor unions exhibit three core functions that serve to build collective power. These are epistemic, deliberative, and pedagogical. At the macro level, labor unions leverage their distinctive institutional capacity, including resources, institutional knowledge, leadership, and decision-making rules to curb domination. In institutionalizing worker power, labor unions mitigate the constraints on collective action inherent in capitalism.

• Constraining Managerial Power Without Workplace Democracy, In Preparation
  • Recipient of the 2026 GISME Prize in Markets and Ethics

Many workplace democrats are committed to capitalism for its capacity for efficient production but hold that firms should be democratized to eliminate the dominating power of managers and corporations. Workplace democracy transforms the labor-management relationship into one akin to the citizen-representative relationship to make management accountable to workers. This gives rise to what I call the representation problem. Even as a firm is democratized, its shareholders continue to exercise uncontrolled power over the firm. Because exit power can effectively bypass democratic procedures, it remains a source of unaccountable power. Taking seriously the structural dynamics of capitalism, as well as the distinctly economic nature of firms, leads me to argue that consciously and proactively experimenting with sectoral bargaining in the United States is a superior alternative to workplace democracy.