Trade union managers: invisible actors in Trade union dramas

This paper is concerned with a group of people who are almost entirely absent from the literature on trade union governance, trade union managers. It looks at various governance models and seeks to make links between that literature and analogous literature in the management field, in particular between that on the polyarchal theory of trade union organisation and that on stakeholder management. It concludes that managers have become visible and that they seek to manage their organisations subject to a number of constraints arising in some cases from the fact that management remains a somewhat problematic concept in unions. Although the values of trade union managers result in their taking a positive attitude to the democratic process, the boundaries between their roles and the roles of elected activists in the governance structures are unclear and are consequently contested.