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Young People and Trade Union Membership: An International Comparative Study
- Christina Cregan, Chris Rudd, Stewart Johnston
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- Journal:
- The Economic and Labour Relations Review / Volume 3 / Issue 2 / December 1992
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 01 January 2023, pp. 165-180
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- Article
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This paper attempts to test the recent British Industrial Relations model of trade union membership by an examination of a survey of early school-leavers in Dunedin, New Zealand which was carried out in October 1989. The findings offer strong support for the model because the same distinct strands of core motivation and remainder attitudes were evident. This demonstrates that the model could be successfully applied in a different institutional, cultural and economic context. The major cross-national differences to emerge were that most Dunedin youngsters intended to join a union; for them, collective instrumental reasons were very important and values of little significance. Furthermore, there was little evidence of disinterest or ignorance amongst the minority which was negative towards trade union membership.
A recent article on trade union membership (Cregan and Johnston, 1990) suggested that conventional neoclassical theories are flawed by the free rider paradox, whereby a rational individual will not bear the costs of joining a union to gain rewards that are available to all the workforce as public goods. It proposed that the dilemma could only be solved by a membership theory which takes into account several different sources of individual motivation drawn from several disciplines. These were identified in a longitudinal survey of London early school-leavers, 1979–1981, in reasons given by young people for their membership decision, positive or negative, from which employees could be categorised in social movement parlance as core and remainder. However, the authors proposed that further direct investigations should be made in different contexts. For example, it may be that some responses were culturally or institutionally specific, or were based on economic context. Accordingly, a similar survey of a single cohort of early school-leavers was carried out ten years later in Dunedin, New Zealand. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to test the validity of the framework of the model within a different national context.
The article will be organised in the following way. First, a brief summary of the Industrial Relations model of trade union membership will be presented and two hypotheses will be drawn from it. Second, the latter will be tested by a discussion of the results of the Dunedin survey and a comparison with those of the London survey. Third, implications of the findings for the consequences of the 1991 Employment Contracts Act will be briefly examined.
6 - Coalition formation and maintenance in Belgium: a case-study of elite behaviour and changing cleavage structure, 1965–1981
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- By Chris Rudd, University of Essex
- Edited by Geoffrey Pridham
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- Book:
- Coalitional Behaviour in Theory and Practice
- Published online:
- 05 November 2011
- Print publication:
- 13 November 1986, pp 117-144
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Summary
Introduction
The formation and maintenance of government coalitions in Belgium have attracted little scholarly research. In English, there have been chapters in the collection of country-specific studies edited by Bogdanor (1983) and by Browne and Dreijmanis (1982). Elsewhere, studies have primarily been historical descriptive accounts (Höjer 1969; Lemaître 1982; Luykx 1978) with a tendency to concentrate upon the constitutional procedures of coalition formation (Delpérée 1983). This dearth of literature is surprising, considering that coalitions have been the predominant form of government in Belgium since the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1919. There were merely nine days of single-party government between the wars and since 1946 there have been only two cases of single-party government – the Christian-Social majority governments of 1950-4 and the Christian-Social minority government of June–November 1958.
Even if traditional coalition theorists were to focus their research upon Belgium, they would be confronted with a number of serious difficulties. Traditional coalition theory, focussing on policy distance and/or ideological similarities between potential coalition partners, rests upon two basic assumptions: (a) that parties are monolithic actors; and (b) that payoffs are discernible prior to coalition negotiations (Axelrod 1970; De Swaan 1973). Both these assumptions, as we shall see later, are violated in the case of Belgium. Belgium presents a further problem in that the country now has three relatively autonomous party subsystems – one in Vlaanderen (Flanders), one in Wallonie and one in Brussels.