Union democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union

Citation: Seymour Martin Lipset, Martin A. Trow, James S. Coleman (1956) Union democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union.
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Tagged: Sociology (RSS), Social Movements (RSS), Unions (RSS), Organizations (RSS), Politics (RSS)

Summary

In Union Democracy, Lipset, Trow & Coleman offer what amounts to an extended and in-depth rebuttal to Robert Michels' "Iron Law of Oligarchy" - or the theory that as a nominally democratic organization increases in size a small group of leaders becomes increasingly entrenched and increasingly unconcerned hroughout the text, with the interests of the organization's members. The book draws from a multi-year study on the International Typographical Union (ITU), one of the earliest international industrial unions which, through the mid-twentieth century at least, boasted an extraordinary internal democratic political life that included two active political parties as well as numerous associations. Using interviews, surveys, shop-floor observation, and in-depth analysis of numerous documentary sources, the authors compile a multidimensional account of the factors that, they contend, sustain internal democracy in the ITU. Following the summary presented on pp. 463-468, these factors fall into the following categories (each of which is addressed in a corresponding subsection of the book):

1. The history and structure of the ITU and of the printing industry within the climate of North American and European organized labor.
2. The occupational status of printers and other aspects of printer culture and class that support participation.
3. Organizational, social psychological, cultural, and economic factors that drive printers to participate actively in union activities.
4. Structural aspects of the union and the profession that enable equitable access to political resources and participation.
5. Institutions (law, values, etc.) within the Union and the profession.
6. Ideological, psychological, cultural, and structural factors that sustain internal political divisions within the ITU.

Through their mass of evidence, the authors argue that no single element caused the ITU to be more democratic than any other union, but rather that a complex of distinct events, contextual elements, structural, ideological, organizational, psychological, and cultural factors worked to nurture, enable, deepen, and sustain the organizational democracy of the ITU. This is both a strength and a weakness of the analysis: few contemporary sociological studies of movement organizations even attempt such a wide-ranging explanation of the objects of their study, but the breadth also proves resistant to analytical parsimony or much in the way of a proscriptive agenda, as the authors themselves point out in the book's conclusion. In short, it is unclear how the analysis can generalize beyond the specifics of the case of the ITU. Given that the author's analysis is also limited (almost exclusively) to a series of bivariate correlational comparisons, they have no precise method by which to estimate the relative contributions of the factors they analyze to the outcomes in which they are interested. Nevertheless, these limitations are far outweighed by the fact that Union Democracy was a major achievement at the time it was published and that the book remains of enduring significance as a classical sociological study of leftist political movements, organizational democracy, and politics.

Theoretical and Practical Relevance

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