Union Democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union

Union Democracy

Authors	Seymour Martin Lipset, Martin Trow, and James Samuel Coleman
Published	1956 (Free Press)
Pages	455
ISBN

Union Democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union is a book by Seymour Martin Lipset, Martin Trow and James S. Coleman, originally published by New York Free Press in 1956.

The book addresses the factors that influence the power structure and decision making processes in organizations, with a specific focus on the political systems of democracy and oligarchy. The problem seen as central by the authors was the difficulty of maintaining democracy in organizations. The issue was first raised by Robert Michels in his Political Parties and termed the Iron law of oligarchy: all forms of organization, regardless of how democratic or they may be at the start, will eventually and inevitably develop into oligarchies. As organization increases in size, its bureaucracy will grow as well, and leaders of bureaucracy will use their position to increase and entrench their powers, departing further and further from any ideals of democracy the organization might have once possessed (Michels studied organizations that one would expect to be quite democratic: socialist parties and trade unions).

The book is a case study of one particular organization: the International Typographical Union, organization seen by the authors as the most democratic one in the contemporary (1950s) United States; an organization that seemingly disproved Michel's iron law. Lipset noticed that ITU formed an interesting contradiction to the iron law in the 1940s, while studying under one of the 'giants' of sociology, Robert K. Merton, who encouraged him to develop those ideas into an article, and later, a book, a task that Lipset approached with the help of two other researchers, Martin Trow and James S. Coleman. In the course of his research Lipset and others interviewed over 400 members of the ITU.

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