Hana Shepherd, Rebecca Roskill, Suresh Naidu, Adam Reich
Sociological Science August 28, 2025
10.15195/v12.a23
Abstract
A rich literature has established the importance of social networks for explaining participation in contentious politics but has typically treated networks as existing outside the awareness or influence of movement actors themselves. A separate literature has long recognized the importance of “organizing” for successful collective action but has not conceived of organizing in relation to network structure. Bridging these literatures, we develop the concept of “network-driven organizing” (NDO), where organizers allocate relational activity based on perceived social network structure. Using the case of labor organizers in a campaign at Walmart, we analyze more than 80,000 unstructured organizer field notes from almost 120 store-level campaigns between 2010 and 2015 and find that our measure of NDO is positively and robustly correlated with campaign success; going from 0 to 1 on the measure of NDO more than doubles the number of cards signed. We discuss the implications of our results in light of sociological theories of action and the practice of movement organizing.
A rich literature has established the importance of social networks for explaining participation in contentious politics but has typically treated networks as existing outside the awareness or influence of movement actors themselves. A separate literature has long recognized the importance of “organizing” for successful collective action but has not conceived of organizing in relation to network structure. Bridging these literatures, we develop the concept of “network-driven organizing” (NDO), where organizers allocate relational activity based on perceived social network structure. Using the case of labor organizers in a campaign at Walmart, we analyze more than 80,000 unstructured organizer field notes from almost 120 store-level campaigns between 2010 and 2015 and find that our measure of NDO is positively and robustly correlated with campaign success; going from 0 to 1 on the measure of NDO more than doubles the number of cards signed. We discuss the implications of our results in light of sociological theories of action and the practice of movement organizing.
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Supplemental Materials
Reproducibility Package: The data used in this article are proprietary data from the organization
OUR Walmart. More information about this is provided in the Data section. All code used for data processing and analysis is available at https://osf.io/wejb5/. The researchers will make the processed and anonymized data available for replication purposes upon request and subject to review of a plan to keep the data secure and to delete after use.
- Citation: Shepherd, Hana, Rebecca Roskill, Suresh Naidu, and Adam Reich 2025. “Workplace Networks and the Dynamics of Worker Organizing” Sociological Science 12: 537-571.
- Received: February 20, 2025
- Accepted: April 28, 2025
- Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Filiz Garip
- DOI: 10.15195/v12.a23