Varieties of Anti-Corporatist Activism

By Paul-Brian McInerney

When I was in graduate school, my colleagues and friends introduced me to Charles Tilly’s Workshop on Contentious Politics. The workshop met weekly and featured a diverse pool of speakers from the sociology and cognate departments at Columbia and nearby universities. In structuring the workshop, Tilly created an environment of thoughtful deliberation. And while the topics presented at the workshop sounded interesting, they seemed very distant from my research interests at the time. Papers on state building, religious violence, political repression, and of course, revolutions were frequently discussed. These topics were far afield from the economic and organizational sociology I read for my research. Mildly daunted, I began attending the workshop anyway and soon became a regular.

Corporate Networks and the Collective Action of Large Corporations Faced with Protest

Do large corporations respond to social movement protest with an individual, firm-centric rationale or do they develop their strategies relationally with other firms? If they do so relationally, do corporate networks help unify the responses these firms take?

Social movement research has developed a prolific body of scholarship on anti-corporate activism, demonstrating the ways in which activists attain leverage over corporate targets and achieve concessions (e.g., Clawson 2003; Soule 2009). However, most research (and quantitative studies in particular) has emphasized the specific dynamic between social movements and individual firms, neglecting the possibility that how firms respond to protest is also constructed socially through their relationships with other firms.