Editorial Type:
Article Category: Research Article
 | Online Publication Date: 16 Jul 2010
Bureaucracy, Power, and Threat: Unions and Strikes in The United States, 1990-2001
Bureaucracy, Power, and Threat: Unions and Strikes in The United States, 1990-2001
Page Range: 217 – 237
The bureaucratization of many social movements has generated controversy among scholars and activists alike. While there is considerable evidence that formalized social movement organizations (SMOs) tend to be successful, critics maintain that such actors invariably shift resources away from protest, reducing their disruptive potential. The current research seeks to reorient this debate by introducing the concept of threat as an integral, but overlooked, dimension of protest. Specifically, I hypothesize that the costs associated with collective action will motivate formalized SMOs to leverage the threat of protest to achieve new gains. The empirical case is made using data from a sample of labor unions and their strike activity from 1990-2001, a period of growing acrimony between organized labor and firms that is particularly well suited for analyzing threat. The findings highlight the role of threat in movement challenges and how it interacts with the broader environment within which the SMO is embedded.
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