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This article examines the affordances that digital technologies offer to labour unions. The results of our study of 13 trade unions in Canada contrast with the prevailing techno‐deterministic perspectives in the literature which describe digital technologies as fundamentally good, bad or neutral for unions. By adopting an affordance approach, our paper examines how union actors perceive digital technology utility and constraints across five union core functions. The study identifies four digital information and communication technology affordances for unions (visibility, intensification, aggregation and addressability) and contributes to the literature on union renewal by showing how these affordances interact in a complex way and can reinforce trade unions' capabilities.

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This article examines the effect of transformational and laisser‐faire leadership on the part of local union leaders and immediate supervisors on the dual commitment of unionised workers. Building on the social information processing perspective, it is suggested that these leadership styles are linked to commitment through the workplace relations climate (WRC). Based on a sample of 834 unionised workers, our results suggest that WRC represents an important mechanism explaining the effect of the immediate supervisor's leadership in unionised settings. Results also show that transformational leadership on the part of union representatives is positively linked to union and organisational commitment. This article contributes to the WRC and dual commitment literatures by going beyond structural and institutional explanations and considering relational and actor‐related variables, such as leadership styles.

This article examines changes in levels of confidence in unions and proposes an intra-national comparison between Quebec and the rest of Canada based on the analysis of the three most recent waves of the World Values Survey (WVS) database, of which Canada is part (i.e. 1990, 2000, 2006). After noting differences in the trends of confidence in unions in these two regions, we applied the same logistic regression model to both regions, based on the 2006 WVS wave, in order to bring out the determinants of the propensity of individuals to express confidence in unions. The results show both similarities and differences between the two regions. As for the similarities between Quebec and the rest of Canada, it should be noted that involvement in politics and the fact of being unionized had a positive effect on the respondents’ propensity to have confidence in unions whereas most of the socio-demographic variables had no significant effects. As for the differences, the fact of reporting a higher income had a significant negative impact in Quebec, but was not significant in the rest of Canada. The fact of supporting the NDP in the rest of Canada had a more structuring effect on the propensity of individuals to have confidence in unions than the fact of supporting the BQ in Quebec. Moreover, the greater the extent to which citizens in Quebec identified with left-leaning ideological positions, the more likely they were to have confidence in unions. Finally, the respondent’s level of education was not significant in the rest of Canada but, cetiris paribus, was highly significant and positively related to confidence in unions in Quebec.