Making networks and (re)making trade union bureaucracy: A European-wide case study of trade union engagement with the Internet and networking

Abstract

The Internet increasingly forms part of formal trade union responses to changing economic and political challenges but in quite complex ways, due to the manner in which different constituents harness and mediate its development. The paper shows how networking is the object of competing meanings and interventions, and the subject of a range of issues in terms of organisational hierarchies, competing communities of practice and competing understandings and traditions of the Internet itself. © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.