Exploring the Role of Ideology and Sectoral Power for Trade Unions' Social Partnership Choices in Liberal Market Economies

Abstract

While scholars have often debated the outcomes of partnership strategy, they have rarely studied the conditions in which trade unions opt to pursue partnerships, especially social partnerships in liberal market economies (‘LMEs’). By comparing five trade unions' social partnership responses in the US-American and English healthcare systems, this article argues that trade unions' ideological position on partnerships and their level of ‘sectoral power’—which involves membership size and their recognized ability and willingness to pursue sector-wide aims—influence social partnership choices in LMEs more so than national institutional factors. The article contributes to the study of social partnership by departing from the prevailing assumption that macro-institutional supports are a necessary condition for unions’ strategic choice of social partnerships, instead, conceptualizing the organizational and sectoral conditions of a more agential pathway to social partnerships based partly on a novel type of union power (‘sectoral power’) where macro-institutional supports are absent.