From Biographical Accounts to a Grounded Theory: Social Worlds of German Trade Unions

Abstract

Abstract This chapter provides both methodological and cultural insights from an empirical research in German trade unions. In my chapter, I explore to what extent organizational research profits from linking procedures of narrative analysis to Symbolic Interactionism (SI) and explain the analytical outcome connected with it. In order to understand the great empirical variety of “becoming a trade union worker,” its regularities and sense for trade unions as a culture, a theoretical approach was needed that would grasp social processes, especially educational and learning processes in social groups and organizations. Therefore, SI is a useful methodological soil. This chapter clarifies the relationships between social group socialization through life course and everyday member work in German trade unions. It points out what is specific for German trade unions, what kind of deviations are peculiar for them, and why we have to think of them as a cultural order of trade unions at least in Germany. This study introduces a theoretical model on German trade unions, which is quite different from usual organizational studies, because it grasps not only some of their aspects, which prevails in association research rather than the organization as a whole.