組合内政治と組合路線

国労の事例研究を通じた理論的考察

抄録

This paper argues that policy orientations of unions are shaped by political processes within unions and do not merely reflect their external economic and social contexts. It first reviews previous studies on union behaviors. While many previous studies explain union behaviors mainly in terms of unions' external political, social, and economic contexts, some recent studies have tumed their attention to internal union politics in explaining union behaviors. Secondly, the paper derives four hypotheses on relations between union policies and the intemal politics of unions from previous research and apply them to the case of the Japan National Railway Workers' Union (Kokuro). The four hypotheses concern two theoretical issues: union leaders' dilemma of policy choice, and relations between militant policy orientations and union democracy. The case study shows that leaders of Kokuro were in a dilemma of policy choice when union-management relations of JNR became tense, and that the union's militant policy orientations mainly reflected the opinion of shopfloor level officials and activists, rather than rank and file members. In the third section, the paper examines the long-term effects ofthe intemal politics ofKokuro on its policy orientations based on the concept of "the logic of organizational behavior." In Kokuro, a militant logic of organizational behavior, once formed in the early 1960s, was reproduced thereafter by lower-ranked union oflicials committed to shopfloor militancy and increasingly constrained the flexibility ofunion leaders in their policy choice. In the concluding section, the paper briefly considers theoretical implications of this study for general theories of political sociology. It suggests that studies on internal union politics like this one attempt to show effects ofpolitics on economic and social structures, rather than vice versa.