  It is shown that Cornwall's pinch technique can be extended in a consistent
diagrammatic way, so as to describe general background field gauges in
Yang-Mills theories. The resulting one-loop Green's functions are found to obey
Ward identities identical to those derived from the classical action at the
tree level. This generalization of the pinch technique may hence be related to
the background field method implemented with novel gauge-fixing conditions
invariant under background field gauge transformations. To one loop, the
connection between the generalized pinch technique and the background field
method in covariant and in non-covariant gauges is explicitly demonstrated.
