2010/06/01 by Anne Alexander
Social Sciences · #International Labor and Employment Law #Labor Movements and Unions
paper · doi:10.1177/0950017010362144
openalex publication_date 2010/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
This article explores leadership and collective action in the Egyptian workers’ movement since the 1940s, with a focus on the competition between different models of leadership. It argues that leadership is a dialogical process, and distinguishes between two models of leadership — bureaucratic and democratic — which sit at opposite ends of a spectrum of reciprocity between ‘leaders’ and ‘led’. Although such developments are as yet embryonic, the emergence of a democratic model of union leadership, rooted in the particular forms of collective action adopted by Egyptian workers during the post-2006 strike wave, presents the most significant challenge to the dominance of the bureaucratic model since the creation of the current union federation in the 1950s.