{"id":9768,"date":"2016-10-20T14:50:28","date_gmt":"2016-10-20T21:50:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dminlgp.com\/?p=9768"},"modified":"2016-10-20T14:50:28","modified_gmt":"2016-10-20T21:50:28","slug":"from-voice-to-exit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/from-voice-to-exit\/","title":{"rendered":"From Voice to Exit"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Photo<\/a>Calvin Presbyterian Church of Corvallis Oregon is a textbook case study in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.<\/p>\n

Albert O. Hirschman wrote Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States<\/em> as a study of businesses and organizations, and what happens when the quality of the products or of the organization itself decline. He shows how \u201cexit\u201d and \u201cvoice\u201d are used to communicate consumer and member dissatisfaction to leaders, and how \u201cloyalty\u201d to a company or organization affects voice and exit. His study compares and contrasts the worlds of economics, politics, volunteer organizations, etc, and when exit or voice are most likely to be used.<\/p>\n

The functional understanding of \u201cexit\u201d is that when someone is unhappy with a product or organization they stop buying that product or leave the organization. \u201cVoice is here defined as any attempt at all to change, rather than to escape from, an objectionable state of affairs, whether through individual or collective petition to the management directly in charge.\u201d [1]<\/p>\n

Calvin Presbyterian Church holds to a long standing and traditional conservative evangelical faith and theology. As years went by it became increasingly difficult to be a part of the Presbyterian Church U. S. A. This denomination was on a nearly one hundred year trajectory that was perceived by many evangelicals in the denomination as becoming less and less Scriptural in its values, theology, and practice.<\/p>\n

Calvin Church exercised voice in light of this deterioration of our \u201cproduct.\u201d We used voice by attending and speaking up at Presbytery meetings and by participating in Presbytery committees. When the denomination made seriously bad decisions a number of years ago, resulting in a loss of trust, the Calvin Church elders ceased to give mission money, and with another subsequent bad decision notified the Presbytery that we would no longer pay our per-capita apportionment. The Presbytery was informed as to the \u201cwhy\u201d of our actions.<\/p>\n

There was no discernible change resulting from our exercise of voice, and the voices of many other churches. What we did observe was that no one from our church was ever appointed to any of the significant \u201cpower committees\u201d within the Presbytery.<\/p>\n

After years of exercising voice (for some of us, in excess of thirty years) the denomination made one final and fatal decision and the staff and elders of Calvin Church said, \u201cwe\u2019re done,\u201d and we began the process of exit. That process took eighteen months and absorbed more time and energy than we had anticipated. Part of the energy and emotional cost came in the form of pressure not to exit, from those who had a higher level of denominational loyalty than did we. Many Presbyterian pastors and congregations exercised loyalty for years, but in the end theological integrity and loyalty to Scripture had to overrule institutional loyalty.<\/p>\n

Fortunately our elders did not allow denominational anxiety to cause a failure of nerve, and we stayed the course. Eventually the exit was successful, and we \u201centered\u201d into the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. Calvin is now in an organization with high quality product, and where our voice is valued.<\/p>\n

\u201cVoice is like exit in that it can be overdone…\u201d [2] Early in Donald Trump\u2019s popularity the common comment was that people were voting for a political outsider in protest against the stranglehold the political establishment has on government. How that voice has been overdone! Now we are in danger of electing the singularly least qualified and most morally bankrupt candidate in this writer\u2019s lifetime.<\/p>\n

In my experience and observation, despite our church\u2019s experience with the PCUSA, exit is normally easier than voice. We need look no farther than Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr, and Tiananmen Square in China to observe modern day examples of the cost of voice.<\/p>\n

Besides these severe examples of the cost of exercising voice, there are less radical examples, such as the \u201cAmerica: Love It Or Leave It\u201d (bumper sticker) campaign in the 1960s, which seemed to arise in response to Viet Nam War protests. \"america_love_it_or_leave_it_bumper_bumper_sticker[1]\"<\/a>Enormous pressure was brought to bear to force conformity to a narrow understanding of what it means to demonstrate love for and loyalty to America. Currently we are observing a similar pressure on Colin Kaepernick, quarter back of the San Francisco Forty Niner football team, and his non-standing protest to the National Anthem. Many castigate him for his behaviors, but as a counter point others say that they would never do what he has done, but support his right to exercise voice in this way.<\/p>\n

In Chapter 8, \u201cExit and Voice in American Ideology and Practice,\u201d Hirschman offered a brief history that indicates that exit is, in a sense, the American Way. Our country came into being by way of exit: exit from Europe and when voice protest to the British Crown was ignored, exit from England. He wrote, \u201c…exit has been accorded an extraordinarily privileged position in the American tradition, but then, suddenly, it is wholly proscribed, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, from a few key situations.\u201d [3]<\/p>\n

Sadly, the \u201cExit DNA\u201d of America has had serious unintended consequences: The ease of exit as a mechanism of protest is demonstrated in the speed with which American Christians leave churches, because some (often trivial) thing doesn\u2019t go their way. Perhaps the worst manifestation of exit is the frequency divorce in America. It is almost easier to get a divorce and exit a marriage than it is to get a driver\u2019s license.<\/p>\n

\u201cExit is unsettling to those who stay behind as there can be no \u2018talking back\u2019 to those who have exited. By exiting one renders his arguments unanswerable. The remarkable influence wielded by martyrs throughout history can be understood in those terms, for the martyr\u2019s death is exit at its most irreversible and argument at its most irrefutable.\u201d [4]\"DSC_0959\"<\/a> \"DSC_0967\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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Exit, Voice, and Loyalty<\/em> is a fascinating study of how individuals and organizations express feelings and opinions about the state of affairs in and around one\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

[1] Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 30.
\n[2] Ibid., 31.
\n[3] Ibid., 106.
\n[4] Ibid., 126.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Calvin Presbyterian Church of Corvallis Oregon is a textbook case study in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Albert O. Hirschman wrote Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States as a study of businesses and organizations, and what happens when the quality of the products or of the organization itself decline. He […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[928,251,929,930,750],"class_list":["post-9768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-exit","tag-hirschman","tag-loyalty","tag-nerve","tag-voice","cohort-lgp6"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9768\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}