ABSTRACT
Trade unions have an important potential role to play in the allocation of citizenship and in the associated presentation of particular forms of knowledge to the public sphere. The capacity of union press officers to mobilise and exploit political and symbolic resources, often depends upon their concrete organisational position within a trade union. Indeed, the exchange relationships which develop between union press officers and journalists are essentially material in the sense that they are underpinned by the concrete practices involved in negotiating and exercising control over flows of information from within trade unions as organisations. Trade unions have grown more sophisticated in their use of communication techniques and news media strategies but the decline in membership levels has barely been stemmed; they remain politically marginalised and while the health unions may have won the 1989 publicity campaign, their final settlement could only be represented as a triumph.
