5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

In recent years, the Power Resources Approach has experienced something of a renaissance in labour studies. Its emphasis on the different kinds of power that unions hold, the embedded and relational nature of those power resources, the interactions between them and the strategies required to mobilise and enact them makes it a very useful toolbox for the study of collective action in workplaces and beyond. There are limits, however, in the way that this approach has been applied. Power resources are multi-scalar both in the sense that conflict can play out on multiple scales simultaneously and in the sense that actors can strategically shift their engagement with other actors to different scales. Moreover, workers’ capacity to disrupt a global value chain through exercise of their associational power is mediated at different scales, for example by the pressure placed on the subsidiary by head office, the capacity and resources of the subsidiary itself, and various institutional arrangements in place at each of these scales. Yet, most often, scholarly assessments of them are situated at the workplace or national level. This regular session assesses multi-scalar applications of the Power Resources Approach, exploring its strengths and limitations in explaining transnational labour struggles in and beyond the trade union movement.