'Double‐Breasted Operations: A Management Challenge to Unions in Britain?

The ‘conflictual’ explanation of union decline (centring around the extent and nature of management opposition to unions) has been well documented in the US literature in recent years. This perspective has been taken a stage further in a recent study (involving some cross‐country analysis of changes in the level of union density in the years 1973–85) which concluded that those countries where union density levels had fallen were characterised by management with an above incentive and/or ability to resist unions.