Unions And Legitimacy

Legitimacy is vital to unions. Without it, they lose political and ideological support, members, and access to funds. Gary Chaison and Barbara Bigelow use the concept of legitimacy as a lens through which to understand the steady decline in union size and influence and to suggest new strategies for union revitalization.Chaison and Bigelow relate legitimacy to five case studies: the UPS strike, the organization of clerical workers at Harvard, the AFL-CIO associate membership campaign, the fight against NAFTA, and the Massachusetts Nurses Association Campaign for Safe Care. The cases show the need for unions to move beyond pragmatic concerns and link their activities to the broader interests of their constituencies, demonstrating not only that they offer something tangible in return for support (pragmatic legitimacy) but also that they are doing the right thing (moral legitimacy).Chaison and Bigelow's work has practical implications for the management of unions' core activities—organizing, collective bargaining, and political action.

This book examines and investigates the legitimacy of the European Union by acknowledging the importance of variation across actors, institutions, audiences, and context. Case studies reveal how different actors have contributed to the politics of (re)legitimating the European Union in response to multiple recent problems in European integration. The case studies look specifically at stakeholder interests, social groups, officials, judges, the media and other actors external to the Union. With this, the book develops a better understanding of how the politics of legitimating the Union are actor-dependent, context-dependent and problem-dependent. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of European integration, as well as those interested in legitimacy and democracy beyond the state from a point of view of political science, political sociology and the social sciences more broadly.

Beetham and Lord provide concise and analytical coverage of a key topic within the European Union, that is, the legitimacy of European supra-national governance.

This Brief examines the role of Police Unions in law enforcement policy development. It provides an overview of the historical and political background of police labor unions, and takes a critical look at the shifting perception of labor unions from generally positive to somewhat negative, to compare this perception with their real impact. It examines the perceived role that unions play, whether positive, negative, or neutral in the development and advancement of contemporary law enforcement agencies and their respective policies. This work provides a multisite survey of police administrators’ views and opinions on police union impact on a variety of police functions including: delivery of services, prevention of crime and disorder, and interaction with the public. The results of this research provide a comprehensive look at ways to improve the ways police departments operate and how they improve and enhance legitimacy in their communities.It provides a context for the current state of the public sector labor relations environment. It will be of interest to researchers in criminology and criminal justice, police science, and public policy.

Most of the contemporary debates about the European Union - about its role, its institutional arrangements, its development dynamic, its expansion and possible futures - revolve around the issue of political legitimacy. Legitimacy and the European Union addresses the fundamental issues at the heart of the debates on Europe and examines such key questions as:- -What is the scope of the EU's authority -Is there a legitimacy deficit? If so, how much does it matter -Does political legitimacy only reside in the nation state? Using a multi-dimensional conception of political legitimacy, the text analyses the character and problems of the European Union's authority in respect of democracy, political identity and governmental performance. Its distinctive claim is that political legitimacy can now only be understood as a process of interaction between the state and EU levels, and that this interaction impacts differentially on different member states.

The book analyses the administrative system in the European Union with a focus on the efficiency and legitimacy of the administrative practices. In the analysis three distinct theoretical perspectives are used (a structural, a procedural and a cultural), thus ensuring that a broad variety of factors are included.