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Опубликовано на портале: 22-12-2006
Ред.: Carola Frege, John Kelly
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, 228 с.
As unions face an ongoing crisis all over the industrialized world, they have often
been portrayed as outmoded remnants of an old economic structure. This book argues
that despite structural shifts in the economy and in politics, unions retain important
functions for capitalist economies as well as for political democracy. Union revitalization
in the face of their current difficulties is therefore of fundamental importance.
The book charts the strategies unions are using to respond to global union decline
and to revive their fortunes in five countries - US, UK, Germany, Italy and Spain
- providing a wide range of institutional settings, union structures, identities
and union responses. It provides a rich source of documentation about union activity,
but more importantly it goes beyond description to address two of the big questions
in comparative research: How can we explain cross-country differences of union responses
to global decline? And how effective are these actions in helping to revitalize the
labour movements?
Union strategies and union revitalization outcomes varied strongly across countries
and were shaped by national industrial relations institutions, as well as by the
interactions between union, employer and state strategies. These findings support
the argument for national divergence of the varieties of capitalism literature and
challenge the globalization thesis which predicts a degree of convergence in the
fate of union movements across the advanced capitalist world. There is no single
revitalization strategy that works well for all union movements; the same strategy
is likely to produce different results in different countries. Moreover, evidence
for variation in revitalization outcomes emerges most clearly when we adopt a multi-dimensional
conceptualization of revitalization, moving beyond union membership and density to
embrace economic and political power as well as the institutional dimension of union
reform. Despite serious revitalization attempts in all countries the scale of revitalization
is extremely modest when compared to the great upsurges of unionism in history.
Varieties of Unionism presents important research and analysis of union strategy
for academics and graduate students of Industrial Relations, Management, Politics,
Political Economy, and Sociology.


