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Despite widespread perceptions that the American labor movement is a male-dominated institution, there is considerable evidence women play an important role in many working class struggles. Recently scholars have begun to recognize that the growth of social movement unionism, which began in the 1990s, has created new leadership opportunities for women. Yet analyses of women's representation in political institutions have identified a host of structural and cultural factors that may also shape women's ability to achieve electoral power in these organizations. The findings, based on a sample of 70 local unions, indicate that explanations offered by those interested in women and politics translate quite well to social movements. This research provides important insight into the role of women in organized labor today as well as the interplay of gender and power in formal organizations more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within social movement research, there is increased interest in how movements use repertoires of action strategically to achieve stated goals. Much attention has been paid to characteristics of the actors themselves, and there is considerable debate if more formalized actors prefer the use of more conventional protest tactics. Yet the selection of repertoires depends not only upon the type of actor or the claim that actor makes, but the specific target of protest. While the state is generally regarded as the primary granter of new benefits for movements, many movements - from organized labor to the environmental movement - target corporate, educational, and other institutions. Employing a unique dataset of all protests reported in the New York Times between 1960 and 1990, we examine how repertoire choice is, in part, contingent upon the target in question. Although educational institutions and corporations are targeted by a narrower range of social groups who make a more limited variety of protest claims, the repertoires used to pressure these two institutions are much less conventional and more diverse than those used against the state. We offer some possible explanations for this phenomenon, including the role of the state in shaping the institutionalization of insurgent protest forms. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the development of the resource mobilization perspective, scholars have accorded social movement organizations (SMOs) a central role in their analyses of contentious protest activity. Despite this, there has been little attempt to systematically analyze how important organizational characteristics affect the group's deliberate use of collective action. The industrial strike represents one potentially fruitful area of research to assess SMO/protest dynamics, as labor unions have long been heavily involved in most work stoppages. A unique dataset of 70 local unions measured from 1990-2001 allows me to systematically bridge these two research traditions and address the major role of unions in individual strike efforts. The results indicate that the effects of important organizational dynamics, including bureaucracy and resource allocation, not only has a direct relationship with strike propensity but also interacts with other factors, including the militancy of the union and the industry within which the union functioned, in a number of interesting ways. For example, the negative relationship between bureaucracy and strike activity was further exaggerated when interacted with measures of union militancy. Many results such as these, I argue, demonstrate an important distinction between an SMO's possession of power, and its need to demonstrate it through contentions activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning with Robert Michel's famous "iron law of oligarchy" dictum, leadership, particularly leadership in labor unions, was perhaps the first international organization dynamic to be systematically analyzed by social movement scholars Many working in the Michelsian tradition have criticized leaders of the labor movement for subverting working class struggles in order to advance their own self-interest. Recently, however, a new group of scholars have challenged the major assumptions of the iron law, exploring the dynamic elements of leadership. The paper seeks to build on these recent research by exploring two important topics: 1) how leadership authority is actually conceptualized, particularly within formalized SMO structures, and 2) the specific dynamics of leadership influence on SMO processes. To address the first point, I draw upon Max Weber's concept of rational-legal authority as a foundation for understanding decision-making dynamics within organizations. For the second, I examine two internal SMO processes, the allocation of resources for social change activities, and the selection of particular repertoires to achieve social change, given the entire range of strategies available. Using the organizing efforts of a sample of 70 local labor unions from 1990-2001, I find that a more nuanced understanding of authority provides us with a greater understanding of SMO dynamics than merely examining individuals who occupy positions of political leadership within SMOs. In particular, the political administration, staff, national affiliate, and membership of labor unions all shape, both positively and negatively, important organizing outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1990s, organized labor, under the leadership of John Sweeney, has rededicated itself to expanding the membership base of the labor movement. Currently, unions have two major mechanisms to accomplish this goal in the private sector, the institutionalized National Labor Relations Board certification elections, and the innovative corporate campaign. In this paper I draw upon the concept of repertoire to describe each of the two organizing strategies, focusing on the logic by which they pressure firms into recognizing the union as the employees? authorized bargaining agent. I identify a number of dimensions on which the two types of organizing efforts diverge, including innovativeness, degree of economic damage, worker participation, and the development of collective identity/solidarity. The description is based on an ?ideal-type? of each organizing repertoire. In reality these two strategies lie on either end of a continuum, with most actual organizing efforts falling somewhere in between. I then provide a description of repertoire use among a sample of 70 local labor unions. This descriptive analysis demonstrates that: 1) repertoire choice is rather common in labor union organizing, yet there is little research on this topic, and 2) unions, while constrained by both internal and external factors, ultimately choose which repertoire to employ, and hence should be the primary focus of labor movement research, which has tended to focus on the organizing event itself, and thus ignoring tactical choice altogether. In addition, the research presented here has implications for scholars interested in both tactical choice and recruitment more generally, as the labor movement is not the only social movement that relies upon collective action to develop solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]