Assessing the reaction of trade unions to innovation, this revisionist study asserts that unions do not, in fact, obstruct change as often as is commonly assumed. In a detailed analysis of industrial innovations and labor relations, Willman examines three major industries that have experienced abnormal problems in both the U.S. and Great Britain: the port, newspaper, and automotive industries. The explanation for this pattern isolates the close relationship--in the U. S. and Great Britain--between technological and organized change.

Workers, Managers, and Technological Change: Emerging Patterns of Labor Relations contributes significantly to an important subject. Technological change is one of the most powerful forces transforming the American industrial relations In fact, the synergistic relationships between technology and indus system. trial relations are so complex that they are not well or completely understood. We know that the impact of technology, while not independent of social forces, already has been profound: it has transformed occupations, creating new skills and destroying others; altered the power relationships between workers and managers; and changed the way workers learn and work. Tech nology also has made it possible to decentralize some economic activities out of large metropolitan areas and into small towns, rural areas, and other coun tries. Most important, information technology makes it possible for interna tional corporations to operate on a global basis. Indeed, some international corporations, especially those based in the United States, are losing their national identities, detaching the welfare of corporations from that of particu lar workers and communities. Internationalization, facilitated by information technology, has trans formed industrial relations systems. A major objective of the traditional American industrial relations system was to take labor out of competition.

Neoclassical theory omits the role of bargaining power in the determination of wages. As a result, the importance of changes in the bargaining position for the development of income shares in the last decades is underestimated. This paper presents a theoretical argument why collective bargaining power is a main determinant of workers’ share of income and how its decline contributed to the severe changes in the distribution of income since the 1980s. In order to confirm this hypothesis, a panel data regression analysis is performed that suggests that unions significantly influence the distribution of income in developed countries. Diese empirische Studie untersucht den Einfluss der Staatsform auf den Einsatz und das Ausmaß von Wirtschaftssanktionen unter Verwendung von Regressionsanalysen. Die Ergebnisse deuten auf ein friedliches Wirtschaftsverhältnis zwischen den Demokratien hin. Die bisherige Forschung hat den demokratischen Wirtschaftsfrieden mithilfe der institutionellen Theorie erklärt, die das Sanktionsverhalten auf ein rationalistisches Kosten-Nutzen-Kalkül zurückführt. Demgegenüber vertritt die konstruktivistische Theorie die Auffassung, dass die friedvollere Konfliktbewältigung unter Demokratien auf die Ausbildung einer gemeinsamen Identität, sowie auf gemeinsame Werte und Normen zurückzuführen sei.