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This special issue will focus on processes and mechanisms of the making and unmaking of alliances among different grassroots, civil society, and social movement organizations. The formation of alli...

Public policies implemented to flatten the curve of COVID-19 infections created unprecedented challenges for social movements. Most striking was the de facto temporary suspension of the right to as...

As an Introduction to the Debate section that follows, this article develops the concept of ‘Networks of Labour Activism’ (NOLA) as a distinct, and important, aspect of cross-border, cross-organizational mobilization of workers, trade unions and other organizations and groups. NOLAs are seen as different from traditional labour activist networks in that they are neither solely connected to the position of labour in production processes, nor wholly reliant on the soft and discursive power of advocacy coalitions. The authors understand NOLAs to be characterized by the interaction of different types of labour rights, social movement and community organizations, joining forces in complex forms of strategizing vis-a-vis multiple targets. Thus, cross-boundary strategizing (across organizational and geographical divides) is seen as a basic characteristic of NOLAs. The authors argue that NOLAs continue to be deeply embedded in political-economic contexts of the state and global value chains, and alliance formation reflects the peculiar vulnerabilities and constraints resulting from this embeddedness. This Introduction draws on multiple studies of NOLAs from around the world, but its main focus is on some of those Asian countries which are at the centre of global supply chain capitalism and labour exploitation, and which have become the laboratory for new forms of networked worker agency and activism.

Social movements have become increasingly important in the regulation of working conditions in a context where the intensification of global economic integration, the consolidation of power in multinational enterprises, increased financialization and marketization, and recurrent economic crisis have undermined the capacity of trade unions to co-determine working conditions in transnational businesses. With unions and industrial modes of worker participation being under severe pressure, social movements and civil society organizations receive increasing attention as new actors in industrial relations.

In the context of continuing political, social, and economic crises, trade unions in most European countries are seen as weakened, protest as having little influence, and the solidarity between European populations as damaged. Under these circumstances, scientists and practitioners have placed hope in the cooperation of social movements and trade unions in order to revitalise trade unions and achieve common goals. However, the conditions for forming alliances between trade unions and social movement organisations have, thus far, been primarily researched, and partially theorised, from the point of view of different disciplines. In doing so, approaches that emphasise the strategic alignment with resources and context diverge from approaches that highlight the relevance and necessity of shared ideologies or identities. This contribution aims to bring existing approaches from movement and industrial relations research into dialogue with each other and calls for a further integration of both perspectives. It contributes to a more holistic understanding of joint movement and trade union action current concepts such as social movement unionism cannot provide. It uses two examples to show that instrumental, strategy-driven modes and identity-based, culturally-driven modes of cooperation are not contradictory. There are situations in which strategic decisions on resources and political influence are more decisive than ideological proximity and vice versa. These findings are of social and scientific relevance for understanding mechanisms of solidarity construction and processes of bridging differences even in increasingly fragmented and unequal societies., Im Kontext anhaltender politischer, sozialer und ökonomischer Krisen gelten Gewerkschaften in den meisten europäischen Ländern als geschwächt, Protest als wenig einflussreich und der Zusammenhalt zwischen europäischen Bevölkerungen als beschädigt. Um Gewerkschaften zu revitalisieren und gemeinsame Ziele zu erreichen, wird von Wissenschaft und Praxis Hoffnung in die Kooperation von sozialen Bewegungen und Gewerkschaften gesetzt. Allerdings wurden die Entstehungsbedingungen von Allianzen zwischen Gewerkschaften und sozialen Bewegungsorganisationen bisher nur aus der Sicht der jeweiligen Disziplin erforscht und theoretisiert. Dabei stehen sich Ansätze gegenüber, die entweder strategische Ausrichtung auf Ressourcen und Kontext betonen oder die Relevanz und Notwendigkeit geteilter Ideologien oder Identitäten hervorheben. Dieser Artikel bringt Bewegungs- und industrielle Beziehungsforschung miteinander in Dialog und fordert eine Integration beider Ansätze. Er leistet damit einen Beitrag zu einem holistischeren Verständnis von gemeinsamem Bewegungs- und Gewerkschaftshandeln, was von bisherigen Konzepten wie dem "social movement unionism" nicht geleistet wird. An zwei Beispielen zeigt der Beitrag, dass instrumentelle, strategie-zentrierte und kulturbezogene, identitätsbasierte Kooperation keine Gegensätze sind. Es gibt jedoch Situationen, in denen strategische Entscheidungen über Ressourcen und politischen Einfluss entscheidender sind als ideologische Nähe und vice versa. Erkenntnisse über Mechanismen der Solidarisierung und Überbrückung von Unterschieden sind gerade in zunehmend fragmentierten Gesellschaften von wissenschaftlicher und gesellschaftlicher Bedeutung.

Bibliographie: Zajak, Sabrina/Rehder, Britta: Editorial: Soziale Bewegungen und industrielle Beziehungen, Industrielle Beziehungen, 2-2018, S. 143-146. https://doi.org/10.3224/indbez.v25i2.01

This contribution conceptualizes the politicization of MNCs from outside – the processes by which MNCs become confronted with demands for regulation and engage in political contestation with other non-state actors. It compares two global industries, athletic footwear and toys, to show that the dynamics of politicization follow different trajectories, which are only partially to explain with structural differences across industry fields. If politicization leads to increasing political functioning of business or to a depoliticization of criticism depends to a great extend on the agency of business and their capacity to strategically counter mobilization, but also on the difficulties for activist to construct continuing collective action across a diverse range of cultural-institutional settings.

The book embarks to enrich our understanding of transnational activism within a multilayered governance architecture targeting an internally and externally powerful, non-democratic state. How do transnational labor activist mobilize within the contemporary global governance architecture in order to affect working conditions in China? In order to empirically explore this question, I develop an analytical framework based upon insights from research on social movements and transnational activism, international political economy, international relations, institutional theory, and labor relations which helps to gain a deeper understanding of the development and outcome of transnational activism across a variety of contexts and scales. I propose to analyze the different ways through which labor activist mobilize to study the combined effects of what I call transnational pathways of influence. I distinguish between four main pathways of influence. Transnational labor rights advocates can try to mobilize within or target international organizations (the international-organizational pathway), other states or regions (the bilateral pathway), transnational companies and private regulatory arrangements (the market pathway), or they can support the development of domestic civil society organizations (the civil society pathway). The framework developed in this chapter clarifies how activisms gets shaped by and also shapes the current global governance architecture with its multiple overlapping legal arrangements, each layer having a specific relationship to the domestic context. Hence, the framework helps to situate transnational labor-rights activism and its outcomes within macro-level changes in the global political–economic system and changes in domestic structure of the state targeted.

The central question of this chapter is how social movement actors produce and promote cultural change across national and local settings. We define culture as a set of practices that have shared meanings. Cultural change is thus a change in practices and/or in meanings attached to them. In an increasingly interconnected world, one way for social movements to induce cultural change is to borrow ideas and practices from other settings and install them in their own cultural environment, or to modify existing practices by incorporating borrowed cultural elements or new meanings into them. Social movements can also borrow cultural elements from international law and global discourses, such as environmental sustainability, labour rights, social justice, and human rights, and localize them in a specific cultural setting. In the social movement literature, this process of ideas and practices travelling across borders is referred to as diffusion.