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Alice Rangel de Paiva Abreu is Director of the Office of Science and Technology of the Organization of American States in Washington DC, and Professor of Sociology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. For three years she was Vice President of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). She is also a member of the Executive Committee of the International Sociological Association and President of RC30 Sociology of Work. Her research interests include industrial restructuring and gender and work. alice.abreu@br.inter.net Graciela Bensusán is a professor/researcher at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco, and is also affiliated with FLACSO in Mexico City. She is the author of numerous books and articles on comparative labor policy, organizations, and institutions, including Trabajo y Trabajadores en el México Contemporáneo (co-editor, 2000), which received the Latin American Studies Association Labor Studies Section award for best book. bensusan@servidor.unam.mx Leni Beukema is Assistant Professor of Labor Studies in the Department of General Social Sciences at the University of Utrecht. Her research activities and publications have – beside matters concerning labor movements – focussed on quality and organization of work, network-organizations and time management, and globalization/localization at work. l.beukema@fss.uu.nl Bob Carter is Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department, the University of Leicester, UK. His original interests were focused on the class position of white-collar workers and the nature of their organizations. He has taught trade unionists, has written on labor process theory and the distinctiveness of public sector employment, and is currently developing research on comparative US/UK union strategies. bc20@leicester.ac.uk Harry Coenen is a Professor of Social Sciences (labor studies) in the Department of General Social Sciences at the University of Utrecht. His research activities and publications include among others the theories of structuration and the risk-society, citizenship and social participation, union movements and labor relations and the research methodology of action research. h.coenen@fss.uu.nl Maria Lorena Cook is associate professor in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University. A political scientist, she has published widely on Mexican labor politics, labor reform, regional integration, and transnational movements. Professor Cook is writing a book on labor law reform and union responses in Latin America. MLC13@cornell.edu Rae Cooper teaches industrial relations in Work and Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney. Rae’s research addresses organising and membership renewal strategies of Australian unions. In 2002, she edited a special edition of Labour History on union organising and mobilisation in Australia and New Zealand. Rae is an active union member and the Chair of the New South Wales Working Women’s Centre. r.cooper@econ.usyd.edu.au Daniel B. Cornfield is Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University and Editor of Work and Occupations. His research has addressed the growth, decline and revitalization of labor movements, the wellbeing of immigrants, changing workplace social organization, the employment relationship, and work & family. Among his recent publications is his volume co-edited with Randy Hodson, Worlds of Work: Building an International Sociology of Work (Kluwer/Plenum, 2002). daniel.b.cornfield@vanderbilt.edu Rick Delbridge is Professor in Organizational Analysis at Cardiff Business School. His research interests include the changing nature of work and organizational innovation. He is author of Life on the Line in Contemporary Manufacturing (Oxford University Press) and co-editor of Manufacturing in Transition (Routledge). Peter Fairbrother is a Professorial Fellow in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University, Wales. He researches in the area of trade union and labour studies. This work includes work on changes in public services, international trade unionism and labour rights and the impact of globalisation and de-industrialisation on labour. He has published broadly in these areas and has made a major contribution to debates about trade union renewal. FairbrotherPD@cardiff.ac.uk Enrique de la Garza Toledo is former Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Professor in the Graduate Program in Labor Studies at the Metropolitan University of Mexico, and Editor of the journal Trabajo. A prolific writer on labor and work in Latin America, he was recently awarded the National Prize for Labor Research for his work on productive restructuring, firms, and workers in México in the beginning of the 21st century. egt@xanum.uam.mx Edmund Heery is Professor of Human Resource Management at Cardiff Business School. His main research interests are trends in union organising and union representation of workers with non-standard contracts. Professor Heery is an editor of the British Journal of Industrial Relations and an academic advisor to the New Unionism Task Group of the Trades Union Congress. Russell D. Lansbury is Professor of Work and Organisational Studies and Associate Dean (Research) at the University of Sydney. A Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences, his recent publications include After Lean Production: Evolving Employment Practices in the World Auto Industry, with T. A. Kochan and J. P. McDuffie (Cornell University Press, 1997) and Working Futures: The Changing Nature of Work and Employment Relations in Australia, with R. Callus (Federation Press 2002). He is joint editor of the Journal of Industrial Relations. r.lansbury@econ.usyd.edu.au Héctor Lucena is Professor of Labor Relations and Coordinator of the Doctoral Program in Social Science at the Universidad de Carabobo, Valencia, Venezuela. He has written widely on processes, institutions, and transformations in labor relations in Venezuela and Latin America. hlucena@postgrado.uc.edu.ve Holly McCammon is Associate Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University. Recently she has studied the changing strategies of the U.S. labor movement, particularly its shift from strike activity to legal mobilization. Her interest in collective strategies has also led her to study the U.S. women’s suffrage movement and its use of various tactics and arguments. José Ricardo Ramalho is professor of sociology in the Graduate Program of Sociology and Anthropology of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His main research interests have been related to the sociology of work, trade union and working class movements, and development studies. jramalho@ifcs.ufrj.br John Salmon lectures in industrial relations and Japanese management at Cardiff Business School. He is Joint Coordinator of the Asian Pacific Research Unit at Cardiff. His research interests have been largely associated with workplace relations. Currently, he is involved with empirical research of union organising campaigns in both Britain and Japan. Rachel Sherman is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Yale University. Her dissertation, “Class Acts: Producing and Consuming Luxury Service in Hotels,” is an ethnographic investigation of inequality in interactive service work. Melanie Simms is a lecturer in industrial relations and human resource management at Canterbury Business School, which is part of the University of Kent. Her research interests focus on trade union renewal, specifically attempts to organize groups of workers who are under-represented in the trade union movement. M.Simms@ukc.ac.uk David H. Simpson is a Lecturer in Industrial Relations and Director of the Trade Union Research Unit at Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University. His main interests centre on trade unions, particularly in South Wales, and has conducted research projects for the GMB, GPMU, UNISON, UNIFI and NAHT amongst others. He is currently a member of the ACAS Single Panel of Arbitrators. Doowon Suh is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of International Studies of Korea University in Korea. His research areas of interest cover social movements, historical sociology, sociology of work, and modern Korean society. His current research project addresses the issue of how social movements influence democratic transition and consolidation in the Third World. dwsuh@korea.ac.kr Lowell Turner is professor of international and comparative labor at Cornell University, in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Among his books are Democracy at Work: Changing World Markets and the Future of Labor Unions (1991) and Fighting for Partnership: Labor and Politics in Unified Germany (1998), along with several edited volumes including Rekindling the Movement: Labor’s Quest for Relevance in the 21st Century (2001). Kim Voss is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century and is co-author of Inequality By Design, Des Syndicats Domestiques, and the forthcoming Hard Work: Remaking the American Labor Movement. Her current research is focused on social movement unionism in the U.S. and elsewhere, on the life history of labor activists, and on the impact of participatory democracy on civil society. Mark Westcott is a lecturer in the School of Business at the University of Sydney. His research interests include union structure and activity within workplaces as well as the effects of corporate structure and strategy upon the management of labor.

After decades of declining strike rates in the industrialized world, recent years have seen a surge of militant walkouts in the global South, political strikes in Europe, and unconventional strikes in nonunion sectors in the United States. This new diversity of strike action calls for a new theoretical framework. In this paper, we review the historical strengths and limits of traditions of strike theory in the United States. Building on the emerging power resources approach, we propose a model based on a multidimensional view of associational power, power resources, and arenas of conflict in the economy, state, and civil society. We demonstrate the utility of our approach via a case analysis of strikes in the “Fight for $15” campaign in the United States.

Purpose – This paper extends research on social movement media by focusing on the use of a literary genre – realist fiction – namely, the labor problem novel in the context of the labor movement and countermovement in late 19th-century America.

Methodology – I do a close reading of a significant early dialogical cluster of such novels to address three key questions: (1) Field position of authors – What was the position of these labor problem authors in relation to the movement field and literary field and how did that positioning matter? (2) Genre selection – What was it about the realist novel that attracted labor problem partisans to it? (3) Internal content – How did authors shape the internal structure and content of their stories?

Findings – As literary activists, authors pivoted between the movement field and literary field selecting the novel for the special powers that it possessed relative to other historically available media. Authors produced stories with a good/evil binary attached to characters that stood for emerging social categories in young industrial America. During the Gilded Age (and beyond) the novel played an important role as medium for the labor movement and its opposition – characterizing collective actors, dramatizing forms of action, providing materials for claims of injustice or threats, solutions to social problems, and new categories and collective identities – all with powerful emotional appeal and entertainment value.

Implications – This study suggests that social movement scholars might expand their purview of cultural media used by movements and also take genre and its selection by activists seriously.

Originality – This study demonstrates how literature – realist fiction – has been shaped by movement agents and played an important, but under-appreciated, role in the struggle over cultural supremacy in the context of movement–countermovement dynamics.

In recent years, the long-declining U.S. labor movement has refocused in new and promising ways on rank-and-file mobilization, in organizing drives, collective bargaining conflicts and political campaigns. Such efforts are widely viewed as the best hope for revitalizing the labor movement: breathing new life into tired old unions, winning organizing drives and raising membership levels, increasing political influence, pushing toward the power necessary to reform labor law and ineffective labor institutions. The stakes are high and the goals ambitious: to close the “representation gap” at the workplace, reverse growing economic and social inequality, and build new coalitions for expanded democratic participation in local, national and global politics.

Neoliberal globalization is not a process in which capital freely moves around the globe and exploits labor tied to families, communities and nation states. Labor often moves, wants to move and has to move in this process. Labor required by the expanding circuit of capital exists as mobile labor. However, the movement of labor is allowed in a highly selective manner, depending upon the changing needs in the spaces of capital accumulation. Nation states continue to utilize borders to control labor mobility. These borders are boundaries built upon segregation between and discrimination against people of different races, genders, nationalities and residential statuses. Whereas this “bordered global capitalism” certainly made migration more costly, uncomfortable and risky process, it could not stop the increasing flow of migration. In fact, the mobility of labor has always been central to the reproduction of capitalism while the excessive mobility of labor or “escape” of labor often threatens capitalism maintained by borders as an external expression of exclusive citizenship that gives coherence to the otherwise class-divided population. This chapter looks into the ways in which migrant labor, despite all the constraints imposed upon them by borders, struggles to form “citizenship from below” by exercising social movement citizenship and thereby ruptures the fixed notion and institution of citizenship and migrant control regimes. The chapter does so by critically engaging with existing theories of labor migration and citizenship and presenting cases of the struggle of mobile labor in Hong Kong and South Korea.

This paper proposes a new theoretical framework to explain enterprise unionism and conducts the first systematic comparative study of union structure in nine Asian countries. Our framework emphasizes political dynamics and the role of the state in labor relations and argues that the initial period of the collective bargaining era constituted a critical juncture (state labor policy) that occurred in distinctive ways in different countries and that these differences played a central role in shaping the different union structures in the following decades. The nine countries are mainly divided into three groups, depending on the type of state labor policy: enforcement of enterprise unionism; centralization/laissez-faire (non-enterprise unionism); and dual unionism/gradual transition (middle-ground). Governmental data were used for the study. A clear correspondence between state labor policy and union structure in each of these groups was found. We believe that our framework significantly enhances our understanding of the Asian cases. Future research should explore the validity of the proposed framework through comparative studies of Latin American cases where enterprise unions have also been observed.

In this paper, we draw from our own empirical data on worker organizing and identify important concepts that bridge social movement (SM) and industrial relations (IR) theory. In a context of traditional union decline and a surge of alternative types of worker mobilization, we apply SM and IR concepts related to the mobilizing structures and culture to cases of labor organizing via worker centers and community–labor alliances in the United States and China. From an analytical perspective, we argue that the field of SMs and IR can both benefit from this type of cross-discipline theorization.

Labor movements have played a central role in promoting democracy, the expansion of welfare states, and improvements in working conditions in many regions of the world during the last century (Jose, 2002). Despite the central social, political and economic role of labor movements, labor union memberships have declined in many world regions during the last quarter-century. Labor union memberships have declined with increasing global economic competition and capital mobility, the advent of neo-liberal macroeconomic policies, privatization of public services, changes in production technology, the substitution of casual, flexible and contingent employment arrangements for formal, bureaucratic internal labor markets, the restructuring of national economies from manufacturing to services, and mounting employer resistance to unionization (Clawson & Clawson, 1999; Cornfield & Fletcher, 2001; Griffin et al., 1990; Jose, 2002; Olney, 1996; Western, 1997, 1998).

As a site of contestation among job seekers, workers, and managers, the bureaucratic workplace both reproduces and erodes occupational race segregation and racial status hierarchies. Much sociological research has examined the reproduction of racial inequality at work; however, little research has examined how desegregationist forces, including civil rights movement values, enter and permeate bureaucratic workplaces into the broader polity. Our purpose in this chapter is to introduce and typologize what we refer to as “occupational activism,” defined as socially transformative individual and collective action that is conducted and realized through an occupational role or occupational community. We empirically induce and present a typology from our study of the half-century-long, post-mobilization occupational careers of over 60 veterans of the nonviolent Nashville civil rights movement of the early 1960s. The fourfold typology of occupational activism is framed in the “new” sociology of work, which emphasizes the role of worker agency and activism in determining worker life chances, and in the “varieties of activism” perspective, which treats the typology as a coherent regime of activist roles in the dialogical diffusion of civil rights movement values into, within, and out of workplaces. We conclude with a research agenda on how bureaucratic workplaces nurture and stymie occupational activism as a racially desegregationist force at work and in the broader polity.

While the origin of Korean Industrial Relations goes back 150 years when the country opened its seaports to foreign countries, it didn’t emerge as a field of study until 1950s when academics began to write books and papers on the Korean labor movement, labor laws, and labor economics. In this paper, we sketch this history and describe important events and people that contributed to the development of industrial relations in Korea. Korean industrial relations in the early 20th century were significantly distorted by the 35-year-Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945). After regaining its independence, the U.S. backed, growth-oriented, military-based, authoritarian Korean government followed suit and consistently suppressed organized labor until 1987. Finally, the 1987 Great Labor Offensive allowed the labor movement to flourish in a democratized society. Three groups were especially influential in the field of industrial relations in the early 1960s: labor activists, religious leaders, and university faculty. Since then, numerous scholars have published books and papers on Korean industrial relations, whose perspectives, goals, and processes are still being debated and argued. The Korean Industrial Relations Association (KIRA) was formed on March 25, 1990 and many other academic and practitioner associations have also come into being since then. The future of industrial relations as a field of study in Korea does not seem bright, however. Issues regarding organized labor are losing attention because of a steadily shrinking unionization rate, changing societal attitude toward labor unions, and the enactment of new and improved laws and regulations regarding employment relationships more broadly. Thus, we suggest that emerging issues such as contingent workers, works councils and tripartite partnership, conflict management, and human rights will be addressed by the field of industrial relations in Korea only if this field breaks with its traditional focus on union and union–management relations.