This project on anticorporate activism began in the early 1990s when I became interested in understanding the diffusion of innovative protest tactics and the effects these can have on organizational decisions. This became the subject of my dissertation project, which was on the student divestment movement and its effects on university divestment from South Africa. But, like so many other projects, this was only the beginning. As an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, I watched the United Students Against Sweatshops take over the administration building in an effort to force the university to stop buying university apparel from companies using sweatshop labor. And I was in Tucson when the Earth Liberation Front took responsibility for torching a McDonald's restaurant in protest of that company's poor environmental and animal rights record. These and other events outside of Tucson in this period demonstrated to me that anticorporate activism was alive and well in the 1990s and was not something that collapsed with the fall of apartheid and the end of the student divestment movement. But, as someone drawn to the history of the labor, peace, and civil rights movements, I also recognized that anticorporate activism was not something that the student divestment movement had invented.

While at Arizona, I began collaborating with Doug McAdam, John McCarthy, and Susan Olzak on the daunting task of collecting protest event data on all public protests that occurred in the United States between 1960 and 1990 and was reported in the New York Times.