Abstract
If you customarily buy a certain brand of toothpaste, and its price goes up or its quality deteriorates, you will change—without much difficulty or conflict—to another brand. If you discover that the car you have just bought has certain features you dislike, you may decide to sell it and buy one of another manufacture; but if you cannot very well afford the new transaction you may decide to write to the manufacturer pointing out the defects and demanding improvements. If your child goes to a state school that dissatisfies you for various reasons, you may decide to change to a private school. But changing schools may be a traumatic experience for the child; or you may not be able to afford a private school; or there may be no private schools easily available; or they may not be available at all. Whenever any combination of these circumstances arises, the more strongly you feel about the quality of your child’s education, the more you are likely to try to do something about the quality of his or her present school, and to find allies among other parents who feel the way you do. If you have been active for many years in a political party, and you are increasingly dissatisfied with some of its policies, you will not just leave and join another party; before you decide to do so, you will try again and again to change the present policies in a direction which suits you better, and the stronger has been your past affiliation, the more difficult you will find it to leave, and the more you will try all possible means to modify the situation from the inside.
This paper is an extensively modified version of a contribution to a collection of articles on the “exit-voice” theme (Tajfel, 1975), which appeared in Social Science Information (Paris) in 1974 and 1975. Reprinted by permission.
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Tajfel, H. (1976). Exit, Voice, and Intergroup Relations. In: Strickland, L.H., Aboud, F.E., Gergen, K.J. (eds) Social Psychology in Transition. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-8765-1_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-8765-1_25
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