Begum Icelliler

• Book Manuscript: 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. Moreover, what a democracy needs for its healthy functioning, including education, healthcare, and physical infrastructure, is provided through the productive efforts of its citizens. Given the centrality of work in the lives of citizens and the functioning of democracies, it is important to understand how work shapes democratic citizenship 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 an alternative path. I argue that the relationship between work and democracy is a two-way street: we should think about how democratic principles play out in the realm of work but also how work shapes democratic citizenship. This reorientation in thinking has surprising implications. On the one hand, not all non-hierarchical workplace relations are compatible with democratic citizenship. For instance, extreme labor market segregation can reinforce existing social hierarchies by generating widespread status beliefs. On the other hand, hierarchical workplace relations can be compatible with democratic principles. This can be realized through institutions that organize workers for the purpose of constraining managerial power.

Each chapter explores the ways that workplace institutions and relationships 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.

• 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.