Premium
‘Ideational power’ as a resource in union struggle
Author(s) -
Preminger Jonathan
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
industrial relations journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.525
H-Index - 3
eISSN - 1468-2338
pISSN - 0019-8692
DOI - 10.1111/irj.12289
Subject(s) - foregrounding , narrative , power (physics) , context (archaeology) , position (finance) , resource (disambiguation) , political science , politics , government (linguistics) , sociology , law and economics , state (computer science) , political economy , law , economics , history , physics , quantum mechanics , computer network , philosophy , linguistics , archaeology , finance , algorithm , computer science
Contributing to our understanding of ideas as power resources in union struggle, this article analyses a labour dispute in Israel's shipping industry. The article follows the union's foregrounding of a specific idea of the state contained within the collective understanding of Israel's history, by which the union legitimised its position in the dispute and significantly influenced a government decision. The article therefore suggests that ideas can be an important power resource, particularly when other power resources are lacking but that this power resource is dependent on the specific ideational context: effective foregrounded ideas draw on a shared narrative that enables political actors to claim the moral high ground, while accusing their adversaries of failing to fulfil their moral obligations as understood via the frame of that shared narrative.