Collective Action Networks: Assessing the Transformation of Trade Union Organisations in Post-Socialist Environment

The transformation of trade unions in post-socialist realm still has not been explored in a sufficient detail. After two decades of swift organizational and political decline, trade unions are still undergoing large scale transformation of economic and political field. Most importantly, former top-down and “general” way of union organization has been replaced by industry-oriented organizing and by enterprise way of organizing at the same time. Massive transformation of economic and politics after 1989 thus necessarily led to the fast transformation of trade union organizations in terms of the intensity and diversity of their cooperation patterns but also of to the rise of competition among them (in terms of interest representation, resources, ideology etc.). However, assessment of such transformation needs to utilize relational perspective in the study of interest promotion and collective action. This paper aims at two goals. First, based on the detailed description of inter-organizational relations of particular trade union organizations it aims at identification of typical patterns of trade unions relations: selection of partners, identification of competitors, intensity and form of these relations, etc. Second, the paper aims at differentiation among the several modes of trade union organizing (private vs, public sector, type of sector, branch vs. headquarters, etc.) in order to identify typical inhibitors of inter-organizational relations in terms of both cooperation and competition. The paper is based on survey data of 42 Czech trade union organizations (2017) and builds on exploratory ego network analysis.