About

Brayden King is the Max McGraw Chair of Management and the Environment and a professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He is also affiliated with the Department of Sociology. His research focuses on how social movement activists influence corporate social responsibility, organizational change, and legislative policymaking. Professor King is an expert on the impact of boycotts and the consequences of employee and shareholder activism, with recent studies examining the change processes leading to improved corporate environmental and social sustainability. He is an international research fellow at the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation and has published research in prominent scholarly journals. His academic background includes a PhD in sociology from the University of Arizona, and he has held various faculty positions at Northwestern University and Brigham Young University. His work encompasses social movements, corporate policymaking, economic sociology, corporate reputation and identity, and sustainability.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Public relations
• Marketing
• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Business
• Political economy
• Development economics
• Law
• Social psychology
• Economic growth
• Criminology
• Economics

Selected publications

• Activism and Its Consequences for Social Evaluation

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2026-02-24

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Social movements and activism are fundamental to a healthy democratic society, shaping which issues are seen as politically, socially, and economically relevant. Organisations and their leaders often engage with movement activists—either as targets of activism, or platforms through which activism occurs. In recent years, employees and even corporate leaders have become voices of activist causes. This chapter explores the social evaluation consequences of such activism. The first part of the chapter examines the link between activism and social evaluations, including audiences’ reactions in changes in public opinion, reputations, and risk assessments. The second part of the chapter looks at the reputational consequences for the activists and their causes as a result of engaging in activism, especially as evaluations evolve in a politically polarised world.

  PublisherDOI

• Amy J. Binder and Jeffrey L. Kidder. The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today BinderAmy J.KidderJeffrey L.The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today. University of Chicago Press, 2022. 224 pp. $25, paper.

  Administrative Science Quarterly · 2025-08-27

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Strategic Interactions in Consumer Politics: Lessons from the Sociology of Social Movements

  Journal of the Association for Consumer Research · 2024-06-20

  articleSenior author

  Recent trends in the sociology of social movements have highlighted how strategic players engage one another in structured but open-ended arenas, as well as switching among arenas. Players can include individuals as well as intentional groupings of individuals such as formal organizations, informal groups, alliances, and sometimes vaguer (less unified) teams such as social movements or states. Arenas also range from informal meetings to highly rule-bound and ritualized settings, but always with outcomes and decisions at stake. Consumer politics often combines individual and team players, and a strategic-interactionist framework can see how these fit together. For example in the common case of boycotts, it turns out that the compound players tend to have more of an effect than individual consumer choices. In its attention to players, the new perspective emphasizes cultural meanings, the points of view of players, their emotions, and their strategic dilemmas and decision making.

  PublisherDOI

• Activists’ Strategic Interactions, Collaborative Tactics, and Local Environmental Performance

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  article

  This paper uses social movement theory and strategic interactions perspective to examine social movement organizations’ use of a diverse set of tactics in their interactions with local communities, firms, and facilities. Using unique, geocoded data on 527 environmental movement organizations’ (EMOs) reported interactions and toxic chemical-based environmental indicator data between 2000 and 2015, we examine the effect of EMOs’ strategic activities and collaborative interactions on local environmental performance and the conditions under which these effects are amplified. Extending and complementing existing measures of movement activities, we suggest a new measure using local strategic activities that better captures local activists’ influence on the local environment. Our empirical analysis also demonstrates that EMOs’ collaborative interactions significantly improve local facilities’ environmental performance and that the effect of EMOs’ collaborative interactions is stronger in communities with higher level of disruptive protests in previous years, lending support to the radical flank effect hypothesis. Our findings contribute to social movement theory and organizational theory by demonstrating the material impact of movement organizations’ strategic interactions on local corporate facilities’ environmental actions and by highlighting the manner in which the level of local EMOs’ past contentious engagement may moderate the effects of cooperative engagement.

  PublisherDOI

• Quantifying social media predictors of violence during the 6 January US Capitol insurrection using Granger causality

  Journal of The Royal Society Interface · 2024-11-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  Protests involving brute force are growing in number and are viewed as a likely source of increased collective violence in industrialized nations. Yet, our scientific understanding of how violent protests are related to a leader's social media communications during protests remains nascent. Here, we analyse new data from the 6 January 'march on the US Capitol' to quantify the links between leadership, social media and levels of violence. Using data on thousands of live footage videos, Trump's tweets and rally speech, other rally speeches and #StopTheSteal tweets, we apply Granger regression methods to analyse the links between former President Trump's tweets, #StopTheSteal tweets, rally speeches and the severity and duration of outbreaks of violence and weapons use during the riot. We find that Trump's tweets predict bursts in rioters' levels and duration of violence and weapons use. Trump's tweets also predict changes in the volume and sentiments of #StopTheSteal tweets, which in turn explain additional variance in levels of violence and weapons use over the course of the riot. Our findings reveal new patterns of behaviour that link an authority figure's online behaviour during a protest and the shift from peaceful protesting to violence.

  PublisherDOI

• When ideologies align: Progressive corporate activism and within‐firm ideological alignment

  Strategic Management Journal · 2024-07-03 · 33 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Research Summary This article examines the association between ideology and firm participation in sociopolitical activism. In particular, it focuses on the ideological alignment between a firm's upper echelons and its general employees. We theorize that participation in progressive corporate activism reflects the ideological views of both the top management team and general employees. By examining firm participation in letter campaigns supporting progressive causes, our findings indicate that ideological alignment between a top management teams and general employees' liberal political leanings is associated with a firm's participation in progressive corporate activism. The CEO's own ideological preferences do not have an independent association with this kind of activism. This article concludes with a discussion of implications for our understanding of corporate political action and nonmarket strategy. Managerial Summary This article looks at the relationship between political ideology and firm participation in sociopolitical activism. Although some have argued that firms' activism reflects a CEO's ideological preferences or employee activism, we find that neither explanation fully accounts for the kinds of companies that engage in this kind of activism. We find that progressive corporate activism reflects the ideological views of both top management and general employees. Our findings suggest that companies that have ideological alignment on progressive issues are more likely to take public stands on those issues because the stands reinforce core values held by employees and the top management.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Putting the YouTuber Front and Center: Organizational Dynamics on Online Platforms

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2023-07-24

  articleSenior author

  Platforms present novel ways of organizing labor, and social media platforms are no exception. Social media platforms have transformed cultural production by bringing together multiple actors, shaping their interactions, and enabling commercialization of user influence and activities. One such platform, YouTube, is a digital content-sharing platform with massive social and economic impact and a site of rich social and cultural processes that are of relevance to organizational scholars. The technological tools on YouTube, such as algorithm-based recommendations, comments, livestreams with chats, and data analytics monitoring, amplify the effects of audiences and algorithms in ways that require the adaptation of existing theories and development of new theories in management scholarship. To illustrate the diversity of processes and empirical contexts on YouTube, we bring together four presentations that ask: 1. How do platforms shape cultural producers’ interactions with their audiences and the role of audience expectations in their work? 2. How do platform algorithms and professional norms interact to affect cultural producers’ meaning-making and practices over their career trajectory? 3. How do cultural producers relying on community ties balance community demands with commercialization? 4. How do platforms allow evaluators of cultural products to amplify social movements? These presentations highlight different tensions that arise between the force of commercialization and other social values – community relationships, authenticity, diversity, and professional norms – as platforms introduce new ways of organizing. They contribute to literatures in organizational theory and economic sociology on the platform economy, cultural production, social movements, authenticity, algorithmic management, entrepreneurship, and evaluations. Traffic Sources: Audience Conventions and Content Creation on YouTube Author: Matthew Rafalow; Google Inc and U. of Southern California Metrics to Rule All?: Worker Reactivity to Metric-based Control and Alternative Source of Feedback Author: Yun Ha Cho; U. of Michigan Just between us: Sustaining online community amidst increasingly commercialized participation Author: Njoke Thomas; Boston College Cultural Gatekeepers as Activists: Relational Policing of Authentic Representation Author: Youjin Jenna Song; Northwestern Kellogg School of Management Author: Brayden G. King; Northwestern U.

  PublisherDOI

• Heather A. Haveman. The Power of Organizations: A New Approach to Organizational Theory

  Administrative Science Quarterly · 2023-07-28

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Beyond Protests: Using Computational Text Analysis to Explore a Greater Variety of Social Movement Activities

  Research in social movements, conflicts and change · 2023-07-03 · 5 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Social movement scholars use protest events as a way to quantify social movements and have most often used large, national newspapers to identify those events. This has introduced known and unknown biases into our measurement of social movements. We know that national newspapers tend to cover larger and more contentious events and organizations. Protest events are furthermore a small part of what social movements actually do. Without other readily available options to quantify social movements, however, big-N studies have continued to focus on protest events via a few large newspapers. With advances in digitized data and computational methods, we now no longer have to rely on large newspapers or focus only on protests to quantify important aspects of social movements. In this paper, we use the environmental movement as a case study, analyzing data from a wide range of local, regional, and national newspapers in the United States to quantify multiple facets of social movements. We argue that the incorporation of more data and new methods to quantify information in text has the potential to transform the way we both conceive of and measure social movements in three ways: (1) the type of focal social movement organization included, (2) the type of tactics and issues covered, and (3) the ability to go beyond protest events as the primary unit of analysis. In addition to demonstrating ways that the focus on counting protest events has introduced specific biases in the type of tactics, issues, and organizations covered in social movement research, we argue that computational methods can help us extract and count meaningful aspects of social movements well beyond event counts. In short, the infusion of new data and methods into social movements, peace, and conflict studies could lead us to a substantial shift in the way we quantify social movements, from protest events to everything that occurs outside of them.

  PublisherDOI

• Effect of organizational status on <scp>employment‐related</scp> corporate social responsibility: Evidence from a regression discontinuity approach

  Strategic Management Journal · 2023-06-21 · 9 citations

  article

  Abstract Research Summary We examine the effect of organizational status on employment‐related corporate social responsibility (CSR). As employees derive nonpecuniary benefits from both organizational status and employment‐related CSR, lower status firms may invest in nonpecuniary employment‐related CSR to compete in a status‐segmented labor market. We identify the effect using a regression discontinuity design (RDD) in the context of the Fortune 1000 rankings, as we contend that the 500th rank position marks an artificial breakpoint in status where quality follows a smooth distribution. We find that firms just failing to make the Fortune 500 perform significantly better in nonpecuniary employment‐related CSR. Our findings provide causal evidence for the labor market advantage of organizational status and a richer window into the strategic motivations behind CSR investments. Managerial Summary We examine one strategic investment that lower status firms make to compete in a status‐segmented labor market: employment‐based corporate social responsibility (CSR). We identify the effect using a regression discontinuity design (RDD) in the context of the Fortune 1000 rankings, as we argue that the 500th rank position creates a discontinuity in status at a precise location where quality differences can be assumed to follow a smooth distribution. We find that firms just failing to make it into the Fortune 500 perform significantly better in nonpecuniary employment‐related CSR as compared to firms just in the Fortune 500. The findings demonstrate that building a reputation for being socially responsible may offset differences in status and make a lower status organization more appealing to employees.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Sarah A. Soule

  15 shared

• Mary‐Hunter McDonnell

  William P. Wharton Trust

  14 shared

• Forrest Briscoe

  Cornell University

  12 shared

• Klaus Weber

  11 shared

• Jocelyn M. Leitzinger

  University of Illinois Chicago

  10 shared

• Frank G. A. de Bakker

  Université de Lille

  9 shared

• Frank den Hond

  9 shared

• R. Mark Greenwood

  7 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Public Policy

  University of Chicago

  2005

• M.A., Public Policy

  University of Chicago

  2001

• B.A., Political Science

  University of California, Berkeley

  1998

Awards & honors

• Best Annual Paper Award, Centre for Corporate Reputation at…
• International Research Fellow, Centre for Corporate Reputati…
• Elected member of Sociological Research Association
• Affiliate Research Scholar, Rutgers Institute for Corporate…