Social Movement Theory, Colletcive Action Frames and Union Theory : A Critique and Extension

The publication of John Kelly’s Rethinking Industrial Relations (1998) spawned a growing interest among researchers in exploring how social movement (SM) theory can be used to inform union research, particularly in the context of revitalization/renewal debates. Our starting proposition is that this approach can be extended thorugh an engagement with the larger corpus of SM theory. We focus in particular on the ‘collective action frame’ (CAF) concept. Drawing on SMT examples, we illustrate how the CAF concept can be more usefully deployed to extend and enrich union theory and pose new questions concerning the role of unions