The unexpected survival of employer collective action in the UK

The study of employer collective organizations has been revitalized recently but the most effective mode of theoretical analysis is debated. This article applies Schmitter and Streeck's competing logics of membership and influence framework to employer organizations in the United Kingdom. While literature using this framework argues that employer collective bodies are likely to prioritize the logic of influence by influencing the state through partnering with governments, we find that the opposite happened in the United Kingdom. Changing political economy meant that the logic of influence decayed in salience although did not disappear. Employer organizations prioritized instead the logic of membership to ensure survival