Union Renewal, Postheroic Leadership, and Women’s Organizing

Crossing Discourses, Reframing Debates

Bibliographic Data

ID11229964
AuthorsLinda Briskin (York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, corresponding author)
Year2011
Volume36
Issue4
Pages508-537
Publication date2011-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLabor Studies Journal (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0160-449X • E-ISSN: 1538-9758
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0160449x11422608
OpenAlexW2114112864
LanguageEN
Citations received20
References cited59

This article examines leaders, leadership, and union renewal with a focus on women’s leadership and organizing. First, it considers the links between union renewal and women’s local and informal leadership; and second, the contribution of constituency and cross-constituency organizing to union revitalization. It scrutinizes notions of “heroic” leaders, often implicit in union discourse and practice, which undermine membership mobilization, impede the diversification of leadership demographics and the union renewal project, and contribute to the invisibility of other forms of often-gendered leadership. It explores the alternative paradigm of postheroic leadership and argues that constituency organizing is a form of postheroic practice. In so doing, this article challenges union-renewal paradigms to take more seriously women’s union leadership and constituency organizing as vehicles for revisioning unions, and offers some alternative entry points into the longstanding political debates and scholarship about women and trade union leadership

Diversification (marketing strategy · Economics · Invisibility · Labour economics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Scholarship · Sociology · Trade union · Employment and Welfare Studies · Labor Movements and Unions · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Public Administration · Marketing

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