Public sector trade unionism in the UK

Abstract

This article explores the potential contribution of Habermas’s social theory to debates on union decline and renewal in the UK public sector. It employs data relating to 2004—5 research on the National Union of Teachers (NUT) to suggest that two of Habermas’s concepts are particularly valuable when considering strategies to increase membership activity. The concept of ‘communicative action’ is useful for highlighting the importance of spaces for collective discussion among members, while the concept of ‘colonization’ allows an appreciation of the ways in which these ‘communicative spaces’ are being increasingly eroded in the course of public sector restructuring. In this context, NUT strategies for renewing membership activity involve opening up alternative communicative spaces for members in schools, the union, and online.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.