MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

9.4. STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT
As with the management of people and physical resources, this section
needs to start with the propositions of this research. In the area of
stakeholder management, these assert that trade union principles
influence trade union managers in the practice of ‘normative
stakeholder management’ as defined in the literature. They go on to
suggest that political and power relations cause boundaries between
managers and lay member stakeholders to be unclear. As section 2.2
of Chapter 2 makes clear, the argument here was that there were links
between the management of organisations identified as polyarchies
and the practice of stakeholder management.
The Hales (1999) framework enables us to examine ‘norms’ and
‘meanings’ which might influence trade union managers in their
managerial practice in this area. Exhibit 9.5 describes trade union
principles seen by managers as impacting on their roles and in two of
the unions, CWU and UNISON, democracy features as a specific
value, along with the notions of ‘fairness’ or people orientation
discussed above. However, discussion with managers of values issues
strayed further into issues of representative rationality.
These are rather too complex to lend themselves to summary, although
similar issues arise across the unions. In CWU, as will later appear,
there appears to be a sense of commitment to the union’s democratic
structures which may well arise from their extensive and, consequently,
embedded nature. This is despite the fact that they more closely
resemble the structures of one of the merging unions rather than the
other. Some senior respondents, though, emphasise their own
accountability to the members in different ways – either by presenting
themselves for re-election to the members after five years (when lay
members were elected annually, leading to some concern about their
low time horizon) – or else by identifying an occasion where members
were consulted directly by ballot.
There are managers in PCS who display commitment to the union’s
systems of representative rationality and to working to achieve
agreement to joint action – just as there are those who express
frustration with it. Consultative structures have been set up to obtain a
variety of member views. But PCS is unique in that the union’s ‘aims
and values’, as presented in the merger ballot, involve the members
being balloted over the heads of leading lay activists voting at
conference. Despite enthusiastic support for these values, it is not clear
the extent to which they were shared, then or now, particularly in the
light of changes made since this research concluded which involved
alteration to certain Principal Rules.
In UNiFI, managers express concerns about particular practical
experiences of the lay member relationship. However, although the
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