The future of employee voice

In this chapter the authors review pertinent themes in existing voice scholarship with a view toward proposing areas for future research. They examine definitional disagreements present in the literature and challenge the assumption that voice needs to lead to something for it to be legitimate, as well as that voice is only directed upwards. They continue by exploring exit and silence as alternatives to voice, and review research which questions how much voice workers actually desire. The authors also argue that voice is tethered to how one conceptualizes the nature work and provide a number of alternatives to that end. They then consider more recent workforce trends such as the rise of gig and platform work, social media and financialization in order to problematize how they might affect the future of voice.