Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena

LYUDMYLA REFERENCES LITERATUR VOLYNETS
of actors’ interest and cultural ideas being the
building blocks of institutions. IR arenas are
addressed as “a complex institutional system
that determines which interests and actors are
to be admitted … [and which] set boundaries
for the courses of action open to the actors…”
(Müller-Jentsch 1996: 31). Such an approach
allows one to address the linkages between the
progress of the institutionalization and actors’
formation, on the one hand, and the tensions
between the macro-level (system) and microlevel
(actors) institutionalization (Wollmann
1997) on the other. It further advances the
understanding of the IR segmentation.
Advancing such a perspective pre-supposes the
recognition of actors’ strategic choices as well
as the scope of changes they go through. Firstly,
those authors highlighting the role of union
discretion over IR (Trif und Koch 2005a,b,
Huzzard, Gregory und Scott 2005, Hanke und
Mense-Petermann 2001) show that even under
the present constraints, unions still have been
able to impose strategic choices on employers.
In spite of union weaknesses, they could be
effective in some IR areas. For example, on
the national level Avgadic (2003) develops an
understanding of union effectiveness that has
resulted from the pre-history of state-unions
interactions and their learning processes. A
similar, process oriented concept was developed
by Frege (2002) pointing that a process of unionmanagement
relationships is determinant
for union effectiveness. It facilitates longterm
union transformation and goes back to
unions’, members’ and managers’ attitudes and
perceptions. Thus, sorting out unions’ choices
in the processes of their relationships with
the management is helpful in tracing unions’
formative processes and the linkages between
the institutional and behavioral aspects of IR
institutionalization.
Secondly, union formative processes go beyond
a solely organizational formation of unions to
their roles and functions. Structural reforms
alone would not be enough to re-constitute
unions’ roles as workers’ representatives 5 . In
this dilemma, unions’ choices are more embracing.
Unions can either resist or collaborate
(subordinate) with employers and the state
(Clarke 2005). Which way unions follow
depends on how they address changes in the
course of their formative processes, meaning
in relation to union identity, agenda, structure,
relationships with members, employers, and
conflict articulation. Such a scope of necessary
changes allows one to capture them as formative
processes. Depending on the progress of
union formative processes, the latter is a part
of the explanation of a variety of enterprisebased
IR ranging from subordination through
union-management cooperation against state
to cases of resistance and contestation. The
formative processes of unions are directly
affected by union embeddedness into interactions
with employers and, in broader terms, by
transformation.
THE INTERACTIONS OF MANAGERS AND UNIONS
ACROSS FSU
Transformation exposes IR actors
to significant challenges originating Seite page 219
from the interplay of the socialist
past and present choices, external
and endogenous factors, as well as those that
come from the interplay between the formal
dimension of policy-making and its informal