Power in Coalition: Strategies for Strong Unions and Social Change By Amanda Tattersall, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010, 209 +xii pp., ISBN 978-0-8014-4899-7 (cloth); 978-0-8014- 7606-8 (pbk).

This new book elucidates the nature of social activism – the patient, usually grinding (but sometimes overnight) processes of achieving social change – and the role of coalitions in activism. In particular, the focus is on the type of activism labelled “community unionism,” a term often used in a fuzzy way to cover many kinds of relationships. Tattersall produces a satisfying and very readable book for both activists and academics. Her own dedicated activism and sustained scholarship contribute in equal measures to making it a significant work, and it cements the author’s role as a significant public intellectual. Power in Coalition culminates six years of scholarship (including a PhD at the University of Sydney), and a longer period of community activity in unions (which includes the past three years establishing the Sydney Alliance, a broad-based coalition of nearly 30 member organizations, launched in 2011 (see: http://www.sydneyalliance.org.au/). The book goes beyond the creation of typologies of different kinds of labour movement coalitions, and avoids mere “thick description.” It asks a key question: what makes coalitions successful? Tattersall does this by an adroit use of social movement scholarship to examine three successful coalitions in which unions played a key role: a public education coalition in Sydney, Australia; a living wage campaign run by the Grassroots Collaborative in Chicago, and the Ontario Health Coalition’s fight in Toronto to save universal health care. Her descriptions of these campaigns are lively, engaging and inspiring. In themselves, they would have been sufficient for an interesting book for activists and those interested in social change. But Tattersall also makes key theoretical contributions to debates on mobilization, activism and unions, standing on the shoulders of giants to do so, but in the process creating a key text in the field. The three case studies form the centrepiece of the book. The scene is set by an introductory chapter which explains why, in “[t]he difficult decade bookended by September 11 and the global financial crisis,” unions – some of them at least – felt the need to rethink old strategies. This is followed by a chapter that locates the work within previous literature and introduces Tattersall’s framework. Following the case studies, two final chapters tie the book together. One identifies “common principles” of coalition success and explains how coalition formation is a component of union revitalization; and the other distils the study’s implications for union strategy, purpose and theory. Tattersall’s theoretical contribution is that she clarifies some concepts with respect to “strategy” and “success” in coalitions, and then links them together, in ways that are informed by wide scholarship. She distills coalition strategy to three elements: common concern, organizational relationships, and scale. She defines four measures of coalition success: winning a specific external outcome; shaping the broader political climate; creating sustainable relationships; and increasing the internal capacity of the coalition partners. She links these two sets of ideas – strategies, and success factors –finding that the three “elements” of strategy do not need to be equally strong to lead to success. Tattersall also skilfully weaves in concepts from the social movement and other bodies of literature. For instance, she explains how alertness to “political opportunity structures” are part of the use of scale, so here politics and geography come together. She also describes how movement organizational culture and the role of bridge builders sustain organizational relationships. Power in Coalition displays keen awareness of both sociological and labour geography perspectives on activism, as well as showing a deep practical understanding of community development and union operation. Tattersall’s “take” on the contested aspects of the …