Epistemic Injustice and Corporate Structuring: Boundary Making, Membership, and Epistemic Rights

Outsourcing has become a significant trend in corporate restructuring. The challenges and injustices faced by labor in outsourcing have been extensively discussed in scholarly literature. These challenges are typically categorized into two main approaches: the injustice approach and the welfare approach. The injustice approach highlights the violations of basic rights and the structural disadvantages experienced by outsourced workers. In contrast, the welfare approach examines the ethics of outsourcing practices through a consequentialist lens, focusing on the overall outcomes. In this paper, I introduce an epistemic perspective on outsourcing. I contend that from an epistemic standpoint, outsourcing can be problematic when it is a calculated effort to employ a multifaceted corporate structure to diminish epistemic rights, specifically the right to be heard and treated as an epistemic equal. This epistemic critique of outsourcing enriches the current literature, illustrating how outsourcing can be seen as an attempt to redefine the boundaries of who deserves the right to be heard.