Union Structural Change

Abstract

Labour unions frequently try to adjust to external pressures by changing their inner structures. Analyses of union structural change will benefit from considering the concept of union jurisdiction. Three organizational stages of jurisdictions are identified, and change of jurisdictions along two variables, extension and centralization, is discussed. The conceptual framework is used to examine, for example, organizational mergers and dissolutions, industrial unionism and jurisdictional conflicts. The rise and fall of organizations, governmental and non-governmental, is a sensitive barometer of the social and political problems of our time. (Perrow, 1971: 99)