The Institutional Logic of Union Organizing and the Effectiveness of Social Movement Repertoires.” American Journal of Sociology 113:1067–1103

Despite the growing interest in union organizing, there has been little effort to systematically describe the organizing landscape in America today. Institutionalization, which is an increasingly im-portant concept in social movement theory, provides the framework for differentiating between the two major organizing repertoires presently available to unions: the traditional National Labor Re-lations Board (NLRB) certification election and more recent orga-nizing that avoids the election process. Evidence from a sample of 70 large local unions from 1990 to 2001 reveals that, although the certification election continues to be the preferred method of mem-bership recruitment, non-NLRB organizing appears to be more ef-fective, in terms of both victory rate and number of workers or-ganized. The findings have implications for future research on labor unions and represent an important step toward an empirical un-derstanding of processes of institutionalization within social move-ments generally. Recent events in the labor movement, including reformer John Sweeney’s successful bid for the AFL-CIO presidency in 1995 and aggressive or-ganizing campaigns by unions such as the Service Employees Interna-tional (SEIU), have produced a dramatic upsurge in scholarship that has taken an optimistic view of organized labor’s future in America (Aron