Tradition, conflict and transformation: Identity as a contradictory process of union renewal

This article treats trade union identity as a contradictory, material, and ongoing process, not a stable orientation or purely discursive construct. Drawing on research on union identity, renewal, and power resources, it argues existing scholarship explains why identity matters more than how it is reworked through organisational conflict, material restructuring, and strategic experimentation. Renewal, in this view, is not a linear accumulation of capacities or a coherent adaptive project but proceeds through selective advances, internal disputes, shifting organisational forms, and partial settlements that reshape what unions are and can do. These claims are developed through a longitudinal qualitative case study of the Organización Sindical de Trabajadores de Aragón, a Spanish territorial union. Tracing its 25-year trajectory, the analysis shows how consolidating a new confederal project required navigating the strategic tensions of industrial conflict, the material demands of financial survival, and contested disputes over political orientation and alliances.