Edward Walker

Professor, University of California, Los Angeles, Department of SociologyProfile URL

My research has investigated how corporations intervene in public life through mobilizing grassroots campaigns and partnering with nonprofit organizations, how business contexts structure the tactical choices of protest groups, and the relationship between professionalized (or “non-membership”) advocacy organizations and traditional membership organizations. I have also studied community-based organizations’ efforts to build power for underrepresented citizens, charitable giving by firms in the health sector, and media coverage of protest.

More recently, my research has investigated the politics of hydraulic fracturing, in a series of projects respectively with Bogdan Vasi and Colin Jerolmack. The first paper with Vasi, on the influence of the Gasland documentary on fracking politics, was published in the American Sociological Review and won article awards in 2016 from both the ASA Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements and the ASA Section on Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology. The paper with Jerolmack appears in the American Journal of Sociology. 

​My book, Grassroots for Hire: Public Affairs Consultants in American Democracy, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2014. The book won the Charles Tilly Award from the American Sociological Association section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements.​

My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the American Sociological Association.​

At UCLA, I am a faculty sponsor of the Movements, Organizations, and Markets Workshop and an affiliate of the Comparative Analysis Seminar.