ABSTRACT
Union attitudes have consistently been acknowledged as playing an important predictive role in various aspects of individual attachment to, and detachment from, unions. For example, general attitudes toward labour organizations have been shown to be associated with the decision to join a union, to become committed to the union, to actively participate in union activities, and voting to decertify the union (Barling, Fullagar and Kelloway, 1992). It is surprising, therefore, that despite the acknowledged importance of general attitudes toward unions, little research has investigated the nature of the construct, or treated union attitudes as a dependent rather than an independent variable. Furthermore, most of the research on union attitudes has been undertaken in North America, where unions have been classified as 'business' unions, and support for unions described as 'instrumental' or 'utilitarian' (Wheeler and McClendon, 1991). These calculative/rational models of unionization have been contrasted with ideological models of union attachment found in those countries where a social movement type of unionism is more typical. One purpose of the present chapter is to describe research that attempts to develop a broader, multidimensional conceptualization of the construct of union attitudes by including both instrumental and ideological attitudes.
