This book is about the building of alliances and about joint activities between two groups of social movement actors ascribed increasing relevance for the functioning and the eventual amendment of democratic capitalism. The chapters provide a well-balanced mix of theoretical and empirical accounts on the political, social and economic catalysts behind the changing motives finding expression in a multitude of novel types of joint collective action and inter-organizational alliances. The contributors to this volume go beyond attempting to place unions, movements, crises, precariousness, protests and coalitions at the centre of the research. Instead, they focus on actors who themselves transcend clear-cut social camps. They look at the values and motives underlying collective action by both types of actors as much as at their structural and strategic properties, and inter-organizational relations and networks. This creates a fresh, genuine and historically valid account of the incompatibilities and the commonalities of movements and unions, and of prospects for inter-organizational learning.

Jürgen R. Grote has been Senior Research Fellow at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin and coordinator of an international network on Labour Relations in Context. He has held the Marie Curie Chair in Public Policy at Charles University in Prague and has worked as Associate Professor, Lecturer and Research Fellow at the MZES-Mannheim; the EUI-Florence; and the Universities of Konstanz, Darmstadt, Potsdam, Jena and Osnabrück. His main research interests include topics such as forms of organized collective action by both capital and labour, European integration, critical governance and relational analysis, on which he has published and co-edited many articles and several books.

Claudius Wagemann is Professor of Qualitative Empirical Social Science Methods at the Goethe University Frankfurt, where he served as Dean of Studies and as director of the inter-faculty Methods Centre. Before this he worked as a scholar at the then Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane (SUM), as Research Associate at the EUI Florence and as an Adjunct Professor at New York University's and Stanford University's study abroad programmes. He has extensively worked on set-theoretic methods, above all Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and Fuzzy Sets, where he has co-authored a leading textbook in the field (Cambridge University Press, 2012). His interests extend to topics of the mobilization of right-wing extremists, the quality of democracy and interest group research in general.