This case study examines the situated interactions between management and workers during a proposed sale of stock by a U.S. steel manufacturer. Our focus permits a fine‐grained analysis of how varieties of meta‐power both condition and are contested in situated interactions. In our setting, the workers owned the company through an employee stock ownership plan, thereby confounding the traditional hierarchical relation between management and workers. While the contrast between these forms of social organization framed the boundaries for subsequent social interactions, it also served to animate conflicts between workers and management. We found that though the worker‐owned company proclaimed values of “corporate democracy” and “employee participation,” executive management acted as a relay to transmit the disciplining effects of “market forces.” Accordingly, the latter served as an “invisible proxy” reinforcing traditional hierarchical social relations that problematized worker participation. The ironies of corporate democracy abound when worker‐owners find themselves shadow boxing anonymous capital.