Wal-Mart has increasingly become the target of protests over its scale, manifested as contention over specific expansions. Often, the protests are local and led by local organizations, and as a result, chains face uncertainty whether local activists will organize a protest. We suggest that chain...

We consider how uncertainty influences the strategic interaction between companies and potential activists who would influence their operations. Our empirical context concerns Wal-Mart, which has increasingly become the target of protests over its scale, manifested as contention over specific...

The current paper connects anxiety about disease contamination to that about cultural contamination and the exclusionary behavior toward ethnic outgroups that it incites. We suggest that when individuals are exposed to disease fears, an epistemic groundwork is laid for construing outgroups as...

Free spaces are arenas insulated from the control of elites in organizations and societies. A basic question is whether they incubate challenges to authority. We suggest that free spaces foster collective empowerment when they assemble large numbers of people, arouse intense emotion, trigger...

Do social movement organizations increase the supply of a public good? We address this question by investigating the role of generalist social movement organizations (SMOs) and technology-focused organizations (TSMOs) for the development of the electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure in...

Although revolutions spawn new organizational forms, sociologists have paid little attention to how economic elites affiliated with the old regime and how challengers unaffiliated with the old order struggle to populate new organizational forms. We suggest that the conflict between elites and...

This article examines how the values espoused by social movements become entrenched in political culture and spawn many new kinds of institutions, which in turn shape organizations far from movements' original targets. We demonstrate the diffuse and indirect effects of social movements, and also...