Scholar at Work: Grant Rozeboom on Business Ethics and ‘Working as Equals’

“At Work” is a series that highlights Saint Mary’s faculty and staff at work in the world. Artists, writers, scholars, scientists—we sit down and dive deep into their latest projects.

Grant Rozeboom arrived at Saint Mary’s in spring 2020—a tumultuous time in higher education and society more broadly, given the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. But as I learned, his recent and groundbreaking book project, which brought together scholars from around the world, has its roots in those difficult months.

That pioneering project began as a workshop titled Working as Equals, which addressed the ideal of relational equality in markets and firms and the connection between a workplace and a society of equals. Last year, Oxford University Press published scholarship from that workshop under the title Working as Equals: Relational Egalitarianism and the Workplace. Co-edited with Julian David Jonker, an assistant professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the book quickly garnered attention outside of academia as well. 

The TransAmerica Professor and Associate Professor of Business Ethics and Social Responsibility in the School of Economics and Business Administration (SEBA), Rozeboom earned his PhD in philosophy from Stanford University. He teaches in the Leadership, Ethics, and Law Department; his research and teaching encompass areas including business ethics, political philosophy, and moral psychology. In spring 2024, he was one of the SEBA faculty teaching Business Ethics who coached Saint Mary’s students to victory in the international Lasallian Business Ethics competition.

He is also a faculty affiliate with the Elfenworks Center for Responsible Business. A Midwestern native, before coming to California he studied and worked in Iowa and taught at St. Norbert College in Wisconsin.

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In the introduction to Working as Equals, you note, “A society of equals must be one in which we work as equals.” The million-dollar question: How do we actually do that—given the hierarchies that the workplace entails?

If I were to pinpoint one idea that emerges as a consensus—this is something we really need to see realized in workplaces—it’s the idea of mutual accountability. It's not just superiors holding subordinates accountable for doing their job. There also need to be mechanisms and norms for subordinates to hold superiors accountable for staying within bounds. 

Exactly what that looks like is going to depend a lot on what kind of workplace: Is it a large corporation that has various governance structures, like a body of shareholders that are external to employees, and a board of directors? Or is it a small family-owned firm? Mutual accountability is going to look very differently in those different workplaces. But the idea that accountability should go both ways is one of the key ideas.

This was a long-term project for you, bringing together scholars from throughout the US, Canada, and Europe—not necessarily to agree, but in 11 essays to shed light on issues as big as workplace hierarchy, the value of social equality, problems of discrimination—and the relationship to democracy itself. How did this come together?

I had started to think about how we could understand some desirable character traits of leaders—traits that support relating to employees as moral equals: a certain kind of humility, and respect that keeps in check paternalistic or intrusive impulses that are otherwise pretty common in the corporate world. I was at the Society for Business Ethics conference, chatting with Julian Jonker, who's the co-editor. He was starting to think about how you support relational equality in workplaces, but coming from a different lens: how workplaces fit within democratic political societies. We knew of a couple of people interested in this general issue. The thought was, “It would be great if we could get all these people together and really try to get this train rolling.”

That spring I came to Saint Mary's to teach. When we first started talking about hosting a conference or workshop, it was February of 2020. We thought it would be in person. While the pandemic meant that wasn’t possible, we pulled the ideas together, and hosted the workshop online the following year. 

We received great interest when we put out the call for papers. Then we were thinking: What should we do with these? An editor at Oxford University Press was really enthusiastic about the idea of a book. 

Are there particular ideas that have already caught traction? 

One is: When we evaluate the structure and the ethics of a workplace hierarchy, a question we have to ask is, Is it respecting the ideal of people relating as morally equals? It has also brought forward concrete issues such as employees' speech and expression, both at work and off work, and boundaries on employer regulation. It's also forcing people to think about the extent to which the ideal of people relating as equals in a democratic society is supposed to be supported by market institutions and firms. 

It's been very common to understand market institutions as serving the aim of efficiency. But when you go back to early market thinkers such as Adam Smith, they also thought it was a part of the job of market institutions to dismantle feudal hierarchy. To what extent should we still see market institutions and firms as playing a similar kind of function? It's not as though we've gotten rid of insidious forms of hierarchy and oppression. Reminding people that this is a part of the heritage of economic thought is something else that I hope that the book does.

In your own essay, “Good Enough for Equality,” you talk about "relational egalitarianism" and "equal authority." Unpack what you mean by that.

Start with the contrast that a lot of early relational, egalitarian thinkers like Smith had in mind—which is feudal society—and then what they were envisioning as democratic and commercial societies. One of the important shifts that was supposed to take place is that everyone should have the same basic standing to conduct themselves and direct their own affairs. Then the institutional question is: In politics, how do you realize that? What are the right kinds of democratic mechanisms to respect that ideal? And then in the economy, how do you realize that? 

There's a natural way in which market exchange does that. Firms introduce a wrinkle; now we have relations of direction and relations between superiors and subordinates. If the background ideal is that everyone entering a firm has the same basic standing to direct their lives, then what has to be respected within the firm is what they had in mind in choosing to enter the firm in the first place—basically, what they thought they were getting into—and the limited way they surrendered some of the discretion they had prior to entering the firm, in terms of how they would be directed at work. That's what I think is central when we think about respecting people as equals the context of a firm. 

“It's not as though we've gotten rid of insidious forms of hierarchy and oppression. Reminding people that this is a part of the heritage of economic thought is something else that I hope that the book does.”

So let’s talk about boundaries and free speech in the workplace.

One way to divide these issues is to think about expression and speech at work versus expression in speech outside of work. We've seen cases of employers clamping down on both. 

An easy example for at work comes from Starbucks, where, in some stores, employees were asked not to wear certain kinds of politically controversial hats or T-shirts—both Black Lives Matter and MAGA gear. When you think about expression being clamped down on at work, it's easy for people to come up with reasons why an employer might want to do that, especially in a customer-facing setting. We don't want to alienate customers. 

Still, there are important questions to ask about the extent to which someone gets to show up to work as themself and the extent to which the form of expression is tied to who they are. It's relatively easy to take off a hat. What about a hairstyle, a piercing, a tattoo? Those typically start to be much more closely linked to someone's sense of themself. The burden starts to shift much more heavily to an employer having weighty reasons to want to restrict or cover up the expression. 

Then there are cases outside of work. The most famous examples are what employees have gotten in trouble for posting on social media. If someone is posting in a way that clearly is not meant to signal that they're an employee of the organization, is it fair for the organization to treat them as acting as a representative of the organization? Or does that start to represent a form of intrusion that we would see as really oppressive? 

Another issue that comes up: How far in someone's past can you go when you're considering what of their posting behavior might be relevant to how they're treated at work? Today it's common for people to come on social media at a pretty young age. We also all know that, even when we were growing up without social media, the kind of banter that would occur between friends would often involve statements that we would no longer want to identify with, and that we would certainly feel embarrassed to still have hanging over us. But now a lot of that banter happens on social media and is memorialized. So there's a question you could put as: How do you still allow people to grow up from being teenagers to adults, acknowledging the mistakes that inevitably involves, while still acknowledging that a lot of it is happening in the public eye, and for that reason is impacting other people? It's important for employers to have a sensitive view of this, so that we're not saying anytime someone makes a mistaken remark as a teenager, that's going to severely impact their employment prospects going forward. 

Now, I don't think most employers have that sort of view. But there are tougher cases where we have seen pretty strong blanket responses by employers. For instance, last fall, when you had college students taking sides in protests related to Israel and its action in the Gaza Strip, you did see employers saying, “We're not going to hire any students who signed or were members of such-and-such club that issued such-and-such statement.” That's an example of the kind of issue that's not only outside of work, that's potentially one or two or three years before a student would be an employee. 

“Democracy isn't just a set of formal institutions. It's also the kind of practices through which we engage with each other—including at work, but also at colleges and universities, in neighborhoods, in schools.”

One of the dimensions is the connection between the workplace and politics, and where equality fits in. 

I hope one of the takeaways is that different kinds of companies play different roles in supporting a political society of equals. Think about the classic small family-run business; the function it plays is pretty limited in terms of providing a set of resources for people to interact more broadly as equals in our political society. The discretion they have to run the business in a way that reflects idiosyncratic preferences is going to be significantly greater. 

But there are other corporations that, not just because of size, but because of the role they play in supporting political infrastructure, have a very different role. Think about what was Twitter and now, to a lesser extent, survives as X: That's a significant venue for speech, for how people make views known, represent themselves when they're running for office, or engage with each other. What comes with that are significantly more responsibilities for thinking about how to run the company—and that piece of our public infrastructure—in a way that respects the ideal of people relating as equals. 

Scholar Debra Satz wraps up her essay by saying: “Democracy is a fragile achievement, and we need to take care in cultivating the psychological bases that are needed to support it. Workplaces are a good place to start.” For you, what does it mean for workplaces to cultivate the psychological bases for supporting democracy?

I think she and I have slightly different views about this. But we agree that if a workplace is domineering and indoctrinating in certain ways, we know, given the amount of time that people spend at work, that can kind of stifle and sap their ability to function—not just as good family members, but as good members of society. In fact, sometimes even by being well-intentioned in imposing workplace policies can have negative consequences. Carolyn Chen’s book Work, Pray, Code looks at how sometimes companies attempt to be one-stop shops for their employees’ lives: Come here for friends, for food, for meaning, for fulfillment. That can sap people's willingness to engage in other parts of their communities, which is corrosive to the project of creating a society of equals and to people's ability to be sharp, engaged citizens. 

Democracy is fragile. And the social institutions and norms associated with it are equally if not more fragile. Democracy isn't just a set of formal institutions. It's also the kind of practices through which we engage with each other—including at work, but also at colleges and universities, in neighborhoods, in schools. So I agree with Satz: It's fragile and needs to be protected.

Teaching at Saint Mary's, are there insights or observations that you would make as you see people—especially traditionally-aged undergraduates—heading into the workplace?

I hope they don't give up on the possibility of productive political disagreement and engagement. Here I mean political in a broad sense; that can cover a number of kinds of conversations that happen at work. It could be a conversation amongst team members, or a whole segment of a working population. What do we think is appropriate workplace attire? What kinds of speakers are we willing to welcome, or not? These are the sorts of topics that generate sometimes heated—and appropriately heated—conversation. But I worry that the primary mode that people now have of seeing one another engage with these issues, especially on social media, is a short, one-sided snippet, where what's rewarded are people who can express their view with a certain kind of outrage or panache. What's funny, entertaining, or outrageous in that context is ill-suited to how those conversations need to go if they're going to be productive within organizations. So I hope we don't lose the possibility of learning how to engage in those conversations, which in part requires the recognition that while there is serious disagreement, I honestly don't think we disagree as much as people tend to believe that we disagree. 

I think we need to ask ourselves: Who benefits from us believing that we disagree as much as we do? It makes it very difficult to enter into productive conversations if you start from the thought that someone is 1,000 miles away politically, and there's really no hope of reaching them with my point of view. Because really, the alternative is that issues can't get settled through any sort of dialogue or real engagement in a workplace setting—which means a simple majority vote is taken, which can be stifling if you don't happen to be on the side of the majority, or it's just decided by fiat, by someone who has power and is able to impose their own view. 

And again, if we're thinking about workplaces as incubators for democratic dispositions, neither of those options is really promising. 

What’s one impact that you hope this book has? 

This might sound awfully ideas-focused. "Respect for the relational egalitarian ideal"—the ideal that in society, people ought to relate as equals—when you think about its heritage in the European Enlightenment, and the influence it has had, it has been around for a few hundred years now. Sometimes I worry that, through that span of time, we've kind of forgotten what the ideal was asserted against. 

There's an essay in the book by Pierre-Yves Néron, where he does a nice job of reminding us what the opponent is: a way of thinking where hierarchical arrangements are desirable for their own sake, because they reveal the ways in which some people are naturally superior to others. Even saying that out loud, it sounds ugly—I think it is an ugly thing to say. We've forgotten that's the real opponent; we sometimes don't notice when it creeps back in. And I think it is creeping back in—certainly into political discourse. So, I hope that as we take this forward, it would be a reminder that this is not an ideal that’s just out there, free-floating as a nice thing to pursue. It's an ideal in tension with a certain kind of tendency that never goes away—which is a tendency to valorize hierarchy, and the idea that there's a natural ordering of persons from greater to lesser. We need to be on guard against that.

Steven Boyd Saum is Executive Director of Strategic Communications & Content at Saint Mary's. Write him.