Explaining Variations in Labor Internationalism in Turkey: Organizational Isomorphism and Local Union Adaptation Strategies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACTThis dissertation investigates the varying levels of engagement in labor internationalism among Turkish industrial unions over the past two decades, examining why some are more likely to develop cross-border strategies and practices than others, despite the measurable benefits of establishing international partnerships—particularly through relationships with global union federations (GUFs). Complicating conventional explanations attributing these divergences to ideological orientations or sectoral dynamics, I argue that variations stem from differing forces of organizational isomorphism, particularly normative isomorphism as defined by Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell. Turkey’s most globally engaged unions cultivate strong linkages with GUFs that are heavily reliant on the concerted efforts of two professional groups—local in-house experts hired by Turkish unions and Turkish-origin expatriate officials working for GUFs. My findings reveal that robust cross-border coalitions are only achievable if local unions possess various organizational resources—membership in national trade union confederations, collective bargaining authorization, relatively high union density, the financial capacity to cover membership dues for affiliating with GUFs, and at least a certain level of local organizing power. However, the presence of professional trade union staffers is the strongest predictor of active global engagement. Conversely, smaller unions with low associational power often remain indifferent toward international labor solidarity or incapable of participating in cross-border cooperation despite their willingness, typically due to the lack of labor professionals. This research poses a challenge to existing scholarship on global trade unionism, which often emphasizes its top-down nature and tendency to suppress labor militancy. While critiques of bureaucratic internationalism—primarily from and focused on North American and European contexts—offer valuable insights, they frequently overlook the practical benefits and even the urgency of such relations with GUFs for local unions in a labor-repressive context like Turkey. To conduct this research, I employed two data collection methods: in-depth interviews and archival research, drawing on union documents, news databases, and labor statistics. I analyzed the impact of a wide range of factors—ideational, economic structural, organizational, and agency-related—on international involvement. In addition to ordinal logistic regression models, I conducted qualitative data coding, including frequency and co-occurrence analyses, to provide a more nuanced and comprehensive explanation for the variations in labor internationalism among 90 Turkish unions across 20 industries
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".