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- Title
Patterns of Union Decline and Growth: An Organizational Ecology Perspective.
- Authors
Kearney, Richard C.
- Abstract
This article reports that organizations are not immortal, business failures occur daily, and even the occasional government agency or program dies. What the future holds for unions and collective bargaining is a question much debated recently. Drawing from the concepts and literature of organizational ecology and institutionalism, the author examines the major factors that appear to account for relative stability in public sector union membership, and attempts to divine union prospects in the first two decades of the 2000s. Although individual labor organizations are discussed, the primary unit of analysis is union density in the public sector. Organizational ecology provides an interesting and useful lens for interpreting the strength, viability and future of labor unions in the public sector. It is informed that organizational ecology's roots are in the theory of population ecology developed by bioecologists. The basic elements of ecological analysis are individual organizations, populations of organizations, and organizational communities.
- Subjects
ORGANIZATION; BUSINESS failures; COLLECTIVE bargaining; INDUSTRIAL relations; LABOR unions; PUBLIC sector
- Publication
Journal of Labor Research, 2003, Vol 24, Issue 4, p561
- ISSN
0195-3613
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s12122-003-1014-1