Taking a Detour to Travel Farther Afield: Reconstructing Collaborative Collective Action Networks through Documentary Traces of Events

Abstract

Social movement scholarship has long examined interorganizational collaboration through diverse theoretical and methodological lenses, with relational theories and network analysis being increasingly adopted. However, empirical investigations of collaborative networks remain limited due to data collection challenges. Reviewing extant network-analytic investigations of collaborative collective action, this paper distinguishes five types of data collection strategies and spotlights indirect-unobtrusive strategies. This long-available yet underutilized approach infers collaborative ties from documentary traces of co-involvement in diverse instances of collective action, offering cost-effectiveness, facilitating longitudinal network analysis, and enabling more theoretically grounded inductive solutions to the problem of network boundary specification. Such benefits are illustrated through recent examples of longitudinal network studies of environmental and LGBTQIA* collective action in distinct local European contexts. By providing a theory of practice of indirect-unobtrusive data collection designs, this article equips social movement scholars with the tools to travel farther afield in their explorations of collaborative networks.