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equirements and industry trends. In the middle are a range of professionalassociations and guild-type unions, such as the System Administrators’ Guildor Graphic Artists’ Guild, that also provide information to help their membersadvocate for themselves individually in the labor market. These associationsmay provide training in individual negotiating strategies, provide detailedsalary information based on surveys of the profession, and ultimately try toempower workers through strengthening their information, knowledge, andskills in negotiating. At the other end of the continuum are organizations thatplay an active, direct role in advocating for their members. This may take theform of collective bargaining in a multi-employer relationship, as in the caseof unions in the construction industry. It may also take the form of advocatingfor legislation or codes of conduct or developing corporate campaigns.Whatever the particular strategy, the goal of these organizations is to improveconditions of employment for their members explicitly by altering the conditionsof employment of firms, not on an individual, but on a collective basis(Bernhardt et al., 2001.Public-sector IntermediariesLabor in the network society 187There are a number of public sector programs and educational institutions thatdirectly play an intermediary role in the labor market. In recent years, theseprograms have expanded their activities and grown more explicit in buildingtheir role as intermediaries. There are essentially three broad types. First arethe range of institutions that make up the workforce development “system.” Intheir efforts to link disadvantaged workers to employment opportunities theseprograms have always had some role as intermediaries in the labor market. Inrecent years, however, these frequently fragmented programs have becomeincreasingly integrated into a “one-stop, career-center system” aimed atimproving their effectiveness as intermediaries. Two components of thesechanges are particularly significant: first, these services are becoming moreavailable to the entire workforce, rather than being reserved for specific subsectorsof the labor market; and second, they are attempting to link trainingmore closely with career mobility. Both these trends suggest the greater integrationof these public-sector intermediary programs into the very structure ofthe regional economy and labor market (Kogan et al., 1997).A second broad type of public-sector intermediary includes educationbasedinstitutions providing adult education and customized job training foremployers. Historically, the education system has been distinct from the workforcedevelopment system, focusing on a broader set of education goalsprimarily oriented toward new entrants to the labor market. Employment trainingprograms, in contrast, acted more as a “second-chance” system, providingoccupation-based training for particular groups of people. In the past twenty