Targeting Organizations: Private and Contentious Politics

At the nexus of social movement and organizational studies is the question of how social movements matter to organizational processes, such as how anticorporate activism impacts corporations, markets, and industries. This chapter presents a framework for better answering this question. The chapter suggests that the contentious and private politics literature should be brought closer together to understand this phenomenon. Drawing on the concepts of scale shift and the political, industry, and corporate opportunity structures, the chapter illustrates how the contentious politics literature can be adjusted to help explain the outcomes of private politics.