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Greetings, 
 
I have recently focused my studies on Albert O. Hirshman's "exit-voice" framework.  Some
political scientists ( such writers as  Brian Barry, A. H. Birch, and Michael Laver) hold
that his contribution falls broadly within the sphere of the economic approach to the
study of society, thereby concluding that the "exit-voice" theory belongs to the
imperialist phase of economics which has begun since the end of the 1950s.
 
On the other hand, Hirshman himself writes: I don't "use the tools of one discipline for
the purpose of annexing another." ( _Exit, Voice, and Loyalty_ Preface) or "as most
economists who have made contributions to political science in recent decades, I have
occasionally used economic models and modes of reasoning to dissect political
phenomena....[but] only a small part of my work has been of this particular kind. In fact,
in much of _Exit, Voice, and Loyalty_ I have been guilty, not of imperialist ambition or
design, but rather of the opposite: namely, of the desire to convince economists of the
importance and usefulness, for the analysis of economic phenemena, of an essentially
political concept such as voice." ( _Essays in Trespassing_ pp. 213-214)
 
A question I would like to pose in HES mailing list  is that whether one can consider "
exit-voice" theory an economic approach which belongs to imperialist phase of economics in
the second half of the twentieth century or not.
 
Mohammad Maljoo 
 
 
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