[Excerpt] In this splendid book, Paul Johnston applies his broad understanding of contemporary social theory to an analysis of a series of carefully matched field research cases to achieve genuine theoretical insights. His analysis addresses such fundamental issues as the nature of public sector unionism—its goals and the weapons it uses to achieve them, the ways it differs from private sector unionism—and the dynamics of social movement unionism. This work is an important contribution to the resurgent body of inductive theory development in industrial relations research that has emerged in recent years.