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.
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