This study examines what has facilitated and constrained the organizational transformation of Korean unions towards industry unionism over the past 15 years, by adopting a comparative case analysis of two leading industry unions – the Korea Health and Medical Workers Union and Korea Metal Workers Union. Our case study demonstrates that the processual effectiveness of industry unionization to a certain extent depends on the union leadership’s strategic capability of how to build a combination of logics of membership and influence in the pathway towards the new organizational structure. The process of organizational transformation towards industry unionism does not lead the two logics of membership and influence to be restructured independently, but to be reinforced interactively.
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