COMPETITIVE STRATEGY AND COLLECTIVE ACTION IN THE UK BREWING INDUSTRY:The Growth and Decline of the Working Men's Club Available to Purchase

Between 1985 and 1988 we were involved in research and consultancy for the Working Men's Club and Institute Union in the United Kingdom. This organisation of voluntary clubs is unique in Europe and has been identified as potentially the largest single consumer group in the European Community. It is active in the political sphere at both Westminster (where it organises the largest All‐Party Parliamentary Committee with 181 sitting members of both houses) and at Strasbourg (a smaller group of active M.E.P.s) and it has set up mechanisms for negotiation for national accounting with the major brewers, although the organisation is itself the major shareholder in two smaller clubs' breweries. Nevertheless, the club union is in a worrying decline, and one of the contributory factors to this has been its commercially naive attitude to the brewery companies with whom its members do business. In addition, the organisation is a democratic affiliation, with what has been argued as being the most democratic but also the most cumbersome and frustrating structure of any British working class institution. In this paper we attempt to describe some of the tensions between democratic altruism and commercial necessity which bedevil the continuing existence of the organisation, and of its constituent clubs, in the context of current industry strategy. Part of this research was sponsored by the UK Economic and Social Research Council grant No. F09 0067, 1986; a further project by the Working Men's Club and Institute Union itself.