Mutual Aid and Union Renewal: Cycles of Logics of Action (review)

Bacharach, Bamberger, and Sonnenstuhl have joined the legion of academics seeking to explain the erosion of U.S. union membership over the past several decades. Their explanation, though mainly a variation of the conventional wisdom, is nonetheless worth reading, primarily for its summary of recent theoretical constructs and empirical evidence from the organizational literature. Unfortunately their proposed remedy, while interesting and innovative, will strike veteran unionists as naive.

First a reprise of the conventional wisdom: during the late twentieth century, capital ushered in a new "mode of production" adept at exploiting global markets of all kinds, largely by escaping the fetters of both government and union regulation. Meanwhile organized labor, ideologically and strategically committed to an earlier mode of production, was not only caught napping but failed to awaken until it was basically too late. Even worse, once awakened labor found itself largely imprisoned by its existing strategy and structure and unable to mount a convincing offense. The core of the problem: the growing dominance of business unionism which focused on delivering services to existing members and failed to organize outside the core economy during the height of American industrial power.

Bacharach et al. burrow inside this narrative to answer the pivotal question: why did labor sleep? Reviewing the literature on union power, the authors conclude that the key is to be found in the exchange relationship between unions and members—the particular "logic of action" on which unions legitimize their authority and obtain member commitment. This term, drawn from social cognition theory, refers to "an interdependent set of representations or constraints that influence [collective] action in a given domain." Logics of action govern an organization's thinking pattern and become embodied in its strategy, structure, and decision-making processes. Once embedded, logics of action prove very difficult to change. Unions, they argue, failed to recognize that different economic and political periods require different "logics of action."

Labor history, in the authors' reading, reveals two alternative, and antithetical, logics of action. One, the Servicing Logic, leads to what we conventionally term business unionism: unions win member commitment by serving their "instrumental needs," like good pay, benefits, safety, job security, and industrial jurisprudence. The alternative is a Mutual Aid Logic, where unions play the role of extended family, appealing to members' need for affiliation, community, and shared values. The servicing logic proves effective in periods of economic and political stability, but becomes highly vulnerable when the environment turns hostile to worker interests. The servicing logic rests on a shallow member commitment to the union, analogous to consumers' attachment to insurance providers. When unions stop delivering expected benefits, members start looking for another provider. In contrast, the mutual aid logic taps workers' deep and broad sense of communal interest and has flourished during periods when the environment was hostile to unionization.

The authors' thesis—that these two logics of action have waxed and waned historically—is laid out in three case studies. They argue that the mutual-aid logic showed signs of renewal during the 1990s in the form of Member Assistance Programs (MAPs). MAPs are a union-sponsored form of Employee Assistance Program in which members are trained to intervene when they observe fellow members engaging in self-destructive behavior due to alcohol or substance abuse. Bacharach et al. argue that such programs are manifestations of the mutual aid logic and are helping to reestablish the unions' legitimacy and to restore member commitment.

There is much to appreciate in this narrative. The question of how collective entities of any sort "change their minds," remains one of the most pondered and least understood problems in the study of social behavior. Studies of major organizational change in unions—of which there are too few—would benefit from the authors' key theoretical concept of logics of action. The three case studies contain rich descriptions of how worker solidarity is rooted in the specific details of occupational...