| This dissertation studies the organizing local approach to labor renewal, a union model centered on organizing new workers. I examine the role of activists and what motivates them to participate beyond a rational evaluation of gains. Additionally, I establish the conditions for successful union reform, specifically, how to overcome inertial pressures and how to maintain members' trust in the union. Finally, I study how union leaders balance a service focus with an organizing agenda, and examine the tensions between formal structures and informal patterns.; I conducted ethnographic fieldwork at a union local of service workers, including participant observation at union events and 66 in-depth interviews with union personnel and active members. I compared two groups of activists: maintenance workers in residential buildings and janitors in commercial office buildings. Further, I studied the outcomes of internal reforms in three sections of the local. My analysis relied on four theoretical traditions: the scholarly and practitioner literature on organizational change, the sociology of work, anthropological analyses of reciprocity, and studies on informal exchange in socialist and post-socialist settings.; My findings show how activists help to maintain the informal, reciprocity-based relationships that make member mobilization possible. Additionally, I reveal previously unstudied meanings of union participation: the importance of personal indebtedness to union leaders, in the case of commercial activists, and the weight of moral obligation towards the next generation, in the case of residential members. Further, I identify the following conditions for successful union reform: the International union's intervention (confirming Voss and Sherman 2000), reformers' attention to workplace disputes and to members' definitions of union strength, and the new system's accommodation of preexisting informal relations and processes.; More generally, my research shows informal and formal mechanisms to connect service to organizing. These include a process of informal exchange between leaders and activists, and a union campaign combining immediate assistance to workers with a longer-term strategy to transform the market. Moreover, my study warns against the unintended consequences of centralization, specialization, and formalization of union work, and calls for formal structures conducive to the use and preservation of what James Scott (1998) calls "local knowledge."... |
