Framing the Change: Switching and Blending Frames and their Role in Instigating Institutional Change

Abstract

Taken-for-granted cognitive schemas form a core aspect of institutions. Whilst much is known about their effects, past research has not yet detailed and formalized how individual actors are able to initiate changes to such institutionalized schemas, reframe their circumstances and how, in turn, such a provisional reframing may itself evolve into a taken-for-granted schema. In this article, we argue that changes to existing institutions come about when actors engage in discursive processes of frame shifting or frame blending by which they articulate alternative or combined schematizations and succeed in building up common ground around the novel cognitive template. We elaborate a set of propositional arguments for when and how actors are more likely to initiate and realize institutional change by either discursively marking the contrast with prior cognitive schemas or by scaling these up into a broader understanding.