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In 1970, Albert O. Hirschman set his thoughts towards organizational decline — a trenchant subject following the summer of 1968, the obvious decline in quality and reliability of American-made automobiles, and the beginning of the collapse of the institutions of the New Deal. To hold organizations accountable, he identified two critical directions for the public to adopt — exit (choose a different provider) and voice ("I want to speak to your manager").

Hirschman warned his readers, however, that both of these approaches on their own created problems. "Exiting" by choosing among equally unreliable automobile manufacturers, for example, simply masked the collective dysfunction of the entire sector (Japanese imports wouldn't start to solve this problem for another few years). Voice, on the other hand, required trust from those working within the institution — a library board has no reason to internalize someone's complaints about libraries, for example, if the complainant is opposed to the existence of libraries more generally.

The solution Hirschman recommended was to add Loyalty to the mix. By combining voice and loyalty, with exit kept available as a safety valve, organizations could receive valuable critiques enabling them to better deliver the goods and services they were designed to deliver — and, if they failed to listen, organizations would find themselves out of customers and out of business.

In many respects, the book proved to be prophetic.

That said, 55 years from now, we now clearly live in Exit's shadow — a world where loyalty is impossible to observe in the space of 240 characters or less, where voice is fractally cacophanous, and where everyone is overwhelmed with an infinite sea of choices in the providers of all things.

Martin Gurri's "The Revolt of the Public" can be thought of as an unofficial sequel to this book.