Membership, identity and internal organization in an employers’ association

In this paper we investigate the development over time of employers’ associations as a peculiar form of meta-organization. In particular, we try to understand how in the last decades the progressive decentralization of the collective bargaining and the reshaping of the economic landscape impacted on employers’ associations by increasing their members’ heterogeneity, and how this has affected their trajectories of evolution, internal functioning and identity. We qualitatively study the case of the largest territorial employers’ organization in Italy (Assolombarda): in the last decades new members were recruited almost exclusively among small size firms and in the tertiary sector; this resulted in an increased heterogeneity of the members’ composition which has lead to different expectations and a new definition of the association mission. The provision of ‘elective’ services as become a major source of financial resources, and a growing number of members now evaluate the overall offer of inducements (either as elective or as selective services) as a key factor in their decision to join and remain. The organizational identity is a key element of many ‘partial organization’ and it is protected by deciding who is allowed to join: by weakening this element, Assolombarda is losing its capability to organize the collective action of the members and it is in fact evolving – even if key actors do not appear fully conscious of that consciously ¬– by increasingly reassembling to a form of business network.