Social media and trade unions: A research of social network analysis in Germany, France, Netherlands, Poland and Turkey

Despite its short history, with over three billion users, social media has gone far beyond being an ordinary means of communication. After 2011, social movements have emerged in the Arab countries, in many countries of Europe, and in the United States. It has been noticed by these movements that social media can be used as an organizing tool. In this aspect, question of how and why trade unions use social media is still being debated. In order to create the theoretical ground of the stud; communication, mass communication, social media theories, the relationship between internet, social media and trade unions, Internet based union change approaches in the world and Turkey will be presented. In this study, the use of social media in trade union activities and the barriers of social media usage of trade unions will be examined. In addition, Some national and international confederations will be discussed with examples of the social media in which activities and how they are used. In the last part of this study, the conceptual framework of social network analysis will be established. Using the social network analysis, five different welfare system countries; Germany, France, Holland, Poland, Turkey and ten different ideological workers' confederations will be examined. Twitter and Facebook accounts of workers' confederations will be analyzed. Finally, the activities of the workers' confederations in the social media and the distribution of the power among the actors in their social networks will be revealed through the results of the analysis results.