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US teacher unions have begun to depart from industrial principles. The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers have endorsed ideas such as peer review, training standards for teachers, job embedded professional development, and alternatives to the standard salary schedule. Union locals are experimenting with variations of these ideas and others. Still, the struggle to organize teaching as mental rather than physical labor is far from won, and it is argued that substantial policy intervention will be required. Changes in labor law and policy often pattern new organizational culture and practice. The conclusion of the article addresses the mismatch between industrial‐era law and contemporary teaching.

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted changes to the terms and conditions of teachers' employment (e.g. working conditions), leading school districts to renegotiate collective bargaining agreements with teachers' unions. However, limited research has examined how these negotiations occur in times of crisis. This study aims to analyze how school district and teachers' union administrators adapted workplace policies to meet staff and student needs during the COVID-19 pandemic by using a panel dataset of Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) negotiated in 187 large US school districts.

The authors used the partial independence item response method to estimate MOU restrictiveness measures that captured the extent to which MOUs limited school administrator autonomy in setting the terms and conditions of teachers' employment. Descriptive analyses and ordinary least squares regression models showed how the scope of collective bargaining negotiations expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how restrictiveness varied across school districts based on district and union characteristics.

Results showed that school district and teachers' union administrators increased restrictions on school administrator autonomy in the spring of 2020, but these restrictions decreased by fall 2021. The level of restrictions agreed upon varied based on the strength of teachers' unions and political partisanship of school districts. The COVID-19 pandemic led to an expansion of collective bargaining negotiations to include previously unconsidered topics such as employee and student health and remote instruction.

This study is one of the first to examine the modifications made to collective bargaining agreements during times of crisis by school district and teachers' union administrators. The findings suggest that there were considerable changes to the terms and conditions of teachers' employment during the COVID-19 pandemic, and that the strength of teachers' unions and political partisanship were associated with negotiation outcomes.

This study seeks to explore the union perspective of a group of unionized young Canadian teachers to understand their belief system about trade unionism.

The methodology used herein consists of collecting and examining the interview data of participants (n = 37) through the theoretical lens of radical perspective.

The findings suggest that participants positively associate unionism with bargaining for their special interests, providing professional development services and opportunities for professional socialization. But this pluralist perspective has not translated into an engagement in the union life.

So far, the findings of this study cannot be generalized to the whole population of Canadian young teachers because the participants’ sample size is not large enough. In consideration of this limitation, unions need to survey the union opinions of their young rank and file members at a large scale to draw a clear understanding of the needs of these members to adequately adjust their renewal and revitalization strategies to those needs.

The findings of this study are significant because the intersection between young teachers and organized labor is underresearched in Canada.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of history in the creation of gender dynamics at work.

Drawing on an ANTi‐history – which draws on actor‐network theory (ANT) – and critical sensemaking framework, the authors analyze a written history of a teachers' union to examine how historically contextualized networks of actors shape notions of gender.

The findings support the notion of history as socially constructed story telling, which serves to shape rather than describe gendered relations at work.

The research is limited to archival materials as the participants are not available as direct informants. Archives by their nature are incomplete and some accounts are summaries.

Understanding the socially constructed role of history will help management educators and practitioners to examine historical accounts as part of the problem of gendered relations. The paper reinforces the notion that understanding of discrimination may be lost as power imbalances are written out of historical accounts in the attempt to be politically correct.

The paper's contribution to research lies in its application of new methods of historical analysis (namely, ANTi‐history and critical sensemaking) and a focus on history as a powerful sensemaking device that shapes on‐going sensemaking.

This article explores two related facets in the history of international teacher union organisations. First, a basic overview is provided of the history of a number of these networks, beginning in Europe well before 1900. Secondly, this exploration will then focus on one particular group ‐ the WCOTP (the World Confederation of Organisations of the Teacher Profession), and specifically its activities during the 1950s and 1960s. This organisation, like its counterparts, was actively involved over its entire history in discussing and promoting a wide variety of issues and activities relating to public education. However, it was also involved in more partisan political activities, in the context of its Cold War engagement with national teacher organisations globally. Drawing on the work of Claus Offe, Maria Elena Cook and Kim Scipes, the article explores these intra‐ and inter‐union affairs, relations with state apparatus, and raises questions about the overarching nature of teachers’ work.

The categorization of different manifestations of teacher activist behaviour is the central focus of this paper. Evidence for the analysis is obtained from interviews with teacher activists and from an extensive period of participant‐observation within an Australian teachers' organization. A matrix of nine categories of activism is described in which teacher unionists are classified according to the strength of their identification with the union (“Us”) or the union leadership's internal and external opponents (“Them”) during a period of intense political and industrial conflict. Some of the personal and attitudinal characteristics of the groups of activist teachers so described are discussed in general terms. The study presents a more complex picture of teacher activism than is implied by the more usual classifications of “left”, “right” and “moderate”. The conclusions drawn might also provide material for more extensive research, perhaps of an empirical nature, into teacher involvement in various forms of political and industrial activism.

There are elevated debates on the role of teacher unions on the effectiveness of education in the USA. The purpose of this paper is to examine if the unionization of education has an impact on the comparative performance of public education in the USA.

The authors classify states into two groups such as highly unionized states and less unionized states for comparing their performance differences. The analyses consist of two stages. First, the authors apply data envelopment analysis (DEA) to the key performance indicators of the groups. Next, the authors use statistical analysis for confirming the statistical significance of the performance differences that may exist between two groups.

The authors have confirmed the adverse impact of unionization on public education using DEA models and non-parametric rank-sum tests. However, the authors are cautious for generalizing the finding due to the limitations described in the research limitation section.

The finding is limited within the selection of the variables and model specification and requires additional studies using different variables and models. The authors hope that the study motivates researchers to conduct further studies in this area.

Major contributions of the study include a novel approach for measuring the performance of primary and secondary schools at the state level by classifying and choosing less or highly unionized states and suggesting insights for improvements.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the various ways in which a group of principals conceptualize the power basis of teachers within teacher–principal interactions.

The present study takes power as a potential to influence people as it was conceptualized in the taxonomy developed by French and Raven (1959/1968) and Raven (1993). This taxonomy was also used to discuss the conceptions emerged in the interview data. A total of 16 principals, 8 from public schools and 8 from private schools, were interviewed.

The phenomenographic analysis of the interviews with the 16 principals revealed five ways of understanding teachers’ power basis. These conceptions (in the form of categories of description) were: (a) the principal’s sense of reciprocity, (b) teachers’ field-specific knowledge, (c) teachers’ administrative experience, (d) teachers’ union affiliation and (e) teachers’ legal rights. Categories (a) and (b) were common to all the study’s participants. Category (c) was unique to participants from private schools, while categories (d) and (e) were unique to participants from public schools.

Three topics – the subtler forms of legitimate power, the issue of teacher tenure and the influence of unions on the educational system – appeared to have potential for interesting future studies in the field of educational management.

There is an apparent need to include social power as a course component in preparatory programs for educational administrators. The revised power taxonomy, which took its final form after the revisions made by Raven (1993), appeared to be an adequate explanatory theory to understand the teachers’ bases of power, and as such, it can be used to structure the content of the course about power interactions in school settings. In addition, the Turkish Ministry of National Education should handle the issue of unions’ improper influence over the educational system and take necessary measures in order to maintain the effective functioning of public schools.

To date, subordinates’ bases of power as a research subject has apparently been ignored. The present study is the first to reveal variations in the ways that school principals conceptualize teachers’ basis of power. Although the study data were collected in one city in Turkey, the research implications drawn from its findings can inspire interest in this neglected field of study all around the world.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the extent to which human resources (HR) decision making is influenced by the social context of school systems. More specifically, this study draws upon organizational theory focussed on the microfoundations of organizations as a lens identify key aspects of school HR decision making at the district and school level.

Interview data were collected from district-level HR directors and local union presidents across 11 districts in Michigan and Indiana. The interviews provided information on the formal and informal aspects HR management. The interviews were audio recorded and transcribed, and the constant comparative method was used to move from initial codes to higher levels of abstraction (Miles and Huberman, 1994; Strauss and Corbin, 1990). Multiple data collection methods were utilized to help validate the interview data that were collected (Stake, 2004).

The key findings show that social relationships, particularly at the school level, influence the distribution of teachers within a district. The findings support the need for closer attention to be given to the social dynamics of school systems and the impact this has on HR decision making, particular with regard to the influence of informal organizational structures and day-to-day interactions within systems.

The current body of research does not fully attend conceptually or empirically to the broader social context of a school system which shape HR decisions. Specifically, researchers and practitioners need to further address the ways that the social dynamics of school systems shape administrative decision making with regard to HR management.

FURTHER EDUCATION PAY AWARD: WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE MACHINERY AND PROCESS OF DISCUSSION THAT PRODUCES AWARDS LIKE THE RECENT TEN PER CENT? AND, DOES THE INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS ACT OFFER HOPE OR THREAT FOR TEACHER UNIONS?