Conflict Frame Research Articles

Conceptions of Conflict in Organizational Conflict Research: Toward Critical Reflexivity

Diverse and often unacknowledged assumptions underlie organizational conflict research. In this essay, we identify distinct ways of conceptualizing conflict in the theoretical domain of organizational conflict with the aim of setting a new critical agenda for reflexivity in conflict research. In doing so, we first apply a genealogical approach to study conceptions of conflict, and we find that three distinct and essentially contested conceptions frame studies of conflict at work. Second, we employ two empirical examples of conflict to illustrate how organizational conflict research can benefit from a more reflexive approach and advance our understanding of conflict. In this essay, we emphasize how philosophical and political assumptions about conflict frame knowledge production within the field and we encourage future theory development to build on different notions of conflict to become better at coping with the complex and dynamic nature of conflict.

What Draws Politicians’ Attention? An Experimental Study of Issue Framing and its Effect on Individual Political Elites

What politicians devote attention to, is an important question as political attention is a precondition of policy change. We use an experimental design to study politicians’ attention to incoming information and deploy it among large samples of elected politicians in three countries: Belgium, Canada, and Israel. Our sample includes party leaders, ministers and regular members of parliament. These elites were confronted with short bits of summary information framed in various ways and were then asked how likely it was that they would read the full information. We test for three frames: conflict, political conflict, and responsibility. We find that framing moderates the effect of messages on politicians’ attention to information. Politicians react more strongly (i.e., they devote more attention) to political conflict frames than to non-political conflict frames and they react stronger to political responsibility attributions than to non-political responsibility attributions. Conflict frames attract more attention than consensus frames only from members of opposition parties. Political conflict frames attract more attention from government party politicians. These effects occur largely across issues and across the three countries.

Framing mechanisms: the interpretive policy entrepreneur’s toolbox

ABSTRACTPolicy entrepreneurs were, originally, neither conceived to be active meaning-makers nor did they interact with other actors. They invested other resources such as time, energy, reputation and money in coupling problems, solutions and politics. Adding the interpretive dimension of interactional framing mechanisms turns them into interpretive policy entrepreneurs. This perspective improves our understanding of policy cases in which initial frame conflicts are resolved by extensive meaning-making work by one specific actor. We illustrate this interpretive policy entrepreneur concept with the innovative Sand Motor mega-sand nourishment scheme case, an artificial peninsula of 21 million m3 at the South Holland coast. Designed to achieve multiple aims, this coastal management scheme should serve coastal protection, nature development as well as recreational purposes. In the risk-averse, complex policy domain of Dutch coastal management, the provincial government of South Holland turned out to be an adept meaning-maker by linking other actors’ problem definitions to their proposed solution. Fourteen in-depth, semi-structured interviews put the provincial government at the heart of several framing interactions that led to frame convergence and ultimately the resolution of the initial frame conflict. Our interpretive analysis of framing interactions concludes that interactional framing mechanisms can reveal interpretive policy entrepreneurs.

Towards A Typology of Conflict Frames

Conflict-framing literature has suffered from a lack of consistent conceptualization and consequently the aim of this paper is to unravel the dimensionality of conflict frames. We conducted a content analysis (N = 1536) to develop a typology of conflict news coverage. Using factor analysis, different aspects of conflict news are distinguished with level of substantiveness and interventionism as the main dimensions. Furthermore, the study focuses on the occurrence of these different types of conflict frames in the news and the role of contextual factors. For example, results indicate that articles with conflict frames contain more interventionism and less strategic framing online, more journalistic intervention in quality newspapers and less substantive news in election times when compared to routine periods. The study contributes to the literature by offering a more nuanced view of the presence of different types of conflict news in the media.

Framing mass surveillance: Analyzing New Zealand’s media coverage of the early Snowden files

This research investigates how New Zealand media framed the mass surveillance debates in the immediate months following the June 2013 Snowden revelations up to the passage of the Government Communications and Security Bureau Amendment Bill 2013. A media framing analysis of news stories from two commercial newspapers and the national public broadcaster in New Zealand (N = 156) revealed frames of lawfulness, conflict, and democratic values dominated coverage; public radio drew upon one additional frame, Edward Snowden the individual. A comparative analysis reveals the commercial newspapers’ reliance on episodic frames opposed to public media’s thematic framing, yet coverage across both samples was overwhelmingly negative. Both samples also privileged official government and foreign media sources. Together, these strategies worked to distance citizens from the surveillance debate by framing it as a political – rather than a civic – issue to be resolved by government leaders. The media’s inability to build a consensus around the surveillance debate and engage citizen voices may at least partially explain the lack of coordinated public resistance against subsequent surveillance policy reforms that effectively expanded New Zealand’s intelligence community’s spy powers.

Masks and Staffs: Identity Politics in the Cameroon Grassfields. Michaela Pelican. New York: Berghahn Books, 2015, 258 pp. $95.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-78238-728-2.

Masks and Staffs: Identity Politics in the Cameroon Grassfields. Michaela Pelican. New York: Berghahn Books, 2015, 258 pp. $95.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-78238-728-2.

A comparison of the visual and story frames Al Jazeera English and CNN employed during the 2011 Egyptian revolution

This study examines a month of cable news coverage of the Egyptian uprising in 2011. Specifically it examines how Al Jazeera English and CNN differ in their use of story and visual frames. The quantitative content analysis ( N = 503) found significant differences between the two networks. Al Jazeera English employs more frames about Egyptian history, political strategies, public engagement, public opinion, economy and the impact on the future of the country more frequently than CNN. When examining visual frames of conflict, Al Jazeera English was more likely to employ conflict frame–not violent than CNN. CNN was more likely than Al Jazeera English to employ the conflict frame–latent violence.

Predicting the Strength of Online News Frames

Framing theory is one of the most significant approaches to understanding media and their potential impact on publics. Leaving aside that fact, the author finds that publicity effects seem to be dispersed and difficult to catch for public relations (PR). This paper employs a specific research design, which could be applied to public relations practice, namely with a view to observing correlations between specific media frames and individual frames. The approach is based on the Semetko and Valkenburg (2000) typology of news frames. The author attributes negative, positive and neutral determinants to the types of frames in his empirical research. Online news regarding three transport organizations and the accompanying user comments (identified as negative, positive and neutral) are analysed by means of the method of content and sentiment analysis. The author recognizes user comments and reviews as individual frames that take part in the creation of online image. Furthermore, he identifies the types of media frames as well as individual frames manifested as image, and undertakes correlation research in order to establish their prediction potential. The results expose the most frequently used types of media frames concerning the transport domain. The media are keen to report through the attribution of responsibility frame, and after that, through the economic frame and the conflict frame, but, on the other hand, they tend to neglect the human interest frame and the morality frame. The results show that specific types of news frames enable better prediction of user reactions. The economic frame and the human interest frame therefore represent the most predictable types of frame.

Media framing of political conflicts

Media framing of political conflicts

Media framing of democratisation conflicts in Egypt, Kenya, Serbia and South Africa

This paper presents an overview of the main findings from a quantitative content analysis covering different types of democratisation conflicts (i.e., conflicts over citizenship, elections, transitional justice and distribution of power) in Egypt, Kenya, Serbia and South Africa. The key findings from the content analysis are organised around several themes: causes of democratisation conflicts, portrayal of conflict parties, preferred solutions to conflicts, perceptions of democracy, role of the media, authoritarian past, and tone of reporting and polarisation. The main finding is that cross-national variations depend on several factors: specific country contexts (and contexts of broader regions from which they come from, including the Arab Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and post-communist Europe); regime type and the stage of democratisation; and type of democratisation conflict (which reflects the main arenas of political contestation). Across all countries, the quality of media coverage is limited by bias, emotionalisation and - most importantly - polarisation. In particular, conflicts over the distribution of power trigger sharp polarisation, whereas elections - contrary to existing literature - seem to force media towards a more restrained style of reporting. The sample involves 5162 newspaper articles and news stories from the four countries.

“Trust, but Verify” – The Framing of the Nuclear Conflict between Iran and the West in UK and US media

Historicity is an important concept in people’s self-conceptualization as well as in their conceptualization of the world around them. By knowing what was, we can interpret some of what is as a consequence of past actions and events and thus understand how it came to be and how to react appropriately. For our interpretation of current events in the world, we therefore frequently rely on history “as a source of meaning” (Leudar and Nekvapil 2011, 68). Since we relate to events in the world through mediation, i.e. the media, we accordingly understand world history through the historical context that is provided for us by journalists. In many cases, however, such contextualizations of events appear to foreground proximal – or synchronous (Blommaert 2005, 130) – factors over distal ones, thus restricting interpretation to immediate factors rather than describing them as a consequence of other actions or events in history. Due to global reach of today’s corporate media, such synchronous framing of the news can lead to a certain bias of attitudes (Philo 2004, 201–202), e.g., regarding the nature of conflicts between ‘us’ and ‘them’ to the effect that ‘we’ always appear as acting on logical, justifiable and altruistic grounds, while ‘their’ actions are irrational, unwarranted and self-serving. In this paper, I analyze the framing of the political conflict between Western countries and Iran regarding its nuclear program. I investigate opinion columns from various British and U.S. newspapers in order to explore the nature of the news framing of the issue and whether any distal factors such as Western interventions in Iran and Middle Eastern affairs are taken into account. The analysis will be conducted following the Thematic Analysis approach developed by the Glasgow University Media Group (Philo and Berry 2004/2011), but including also other conceptual categories such as Blommaert’s (2005) notion of synchronicity.

Issues and Consequences of Newspaper Framing on Ethnic Conflict: A Qualitative Study of Ethnic Group Leaders’ Conflict Frames

This paper attempts to explore the waves of media frames on ethnic group leaders’ conflict frames. In general, the effects of what media frame as news on public behaviours to politics have been discussed extensively in scholarly works. However, the extent that newspapers framing stimulate conflict frame (behaviours) in ethnic leaders who rheostat the hearts and minds of ethnic groups, are still underexplored. Specifically, this study seeks to understand the extent that media frames about ethnic issues have become the driving force behind volatile ethnic groups in Nigeria. Therefore, series of in-depth interviews on 26 ethnic group leaders were conducted and data were analyzed thematically using NVIVO 10 software. The study found that the unswerving newspapers framing on ethnic issues, especially on interethnic relations and politics, culminated to inciting, double standard, name calling, all of which stemmed from the ownership interest, are some of the major factors that widen ethnic differences and eventually stimulated ethnic groups into conflict. Based on the lived experiences of the ethnic group leaders, newspapers are culpable in the emergence and escalation of ethnic conflict as a result of these stimulations. This study has significantly contributed to the understanding of potential influence of conflict frames (behaviors) of ethnic group leaders on ethno-political conflict.

The Exposure of Media Frames Among Malaysian Bloggers Pre and Post 13th General Election

Blog began to attract people in Malaysia in 1998 when bloggers actively wrote about political matters and current issues. Blogs have then become an influential medium of news reporting after the mass community rejects mainstream media which often shows favoritism to the government party. This paper examines how a generic frames used by the bloggers in Malaysia pre and post 13 th General Election (GE). A comparison on two groups of blog is made which involved Pro- Barisan Nasional (BN) and Pro- Pakatan Rakyat (PR) to see the differences in the use of frames by the bloggers. Five generic frames with 20 attributes statement by Semetko & Valkenburg has been adapted in this study. Quantitative content analysis approach was used and the results showed that conflict frame and responsibility frame are at a relatively high level use while the human interest frame, morality frame and economic consequences frame are at the low level of use. However, there are some differences in terms of the use of frames by both groups of blogger even at different political views. The results of the study clearly show that both groups of bloggers have emphasized more conflict frames in all the issues debated.

The dream of statehood and the reality of conflict: local and international coverage of the Palestinian United Nations bid for statehood

ABSTRACTThis paper examines whether or not media coverage is biased by the political orientation of the journalists’ country, specifically illustrated by the 2011 bid for statehood by the Palestinian Authority in the United Nations. This bid represents a symbolic step toward international recognition of a Palestinian state, an important event in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A quantitative analysis was conducted on 1577 news reports from American, European, and Middle Eastern outlets to determine the differences in media coverage of the Palestinian bid for statehood among the channels. The findings suggest that Israeli channels broadcasted a relatively low number of items in which the Palestinian declaration itself was the main theme. The BBC broadcasted a relatively high rate of such items, and offered balanced coverage of both Israeli and Palestinian positions, while coverage by American FOX News channel reflected a pro-Israel bias. The findings also suggest that media outlets may be biased toward specific leaders. This work builds on a growing body of research on media framing of political conflicts and the effect of the political context of a country on its media outlets’ coverage.

Comparative Study of Local and National Media Reporting: Conflict around the TV Oak in Stockholm, Sweden

The TV oak (Television Oak) conflict concerned felling an old tree in a wealthy area of Stockholm. The case received great public attention in different media formats with different scopes (e.g., newspapers, television, internet). The TV Oak issue involved actors with different, partly conflicting perceptions. Assuming that the relevance of urban tree management issues in particular leads to increased interest among the local audience, this paper compared differences in reporting on the TV Oak case in local and national newspapers. The comparison comprised the actors “speaking” in the newspapers, the interest roles attributed to different actors and the frames used. The empirical materials used were articles concerning the TV Oak published between October 2011 and June 2012 in one local and two national Swedish newspapers. Quantitative analysis of statements in these articles showed that the geographical scope of the newspaper was not the major driving force framing the TV Oak conflict and that variety of framings, ranging from a humanised perception of the oak to a more analytical hazard perception, were used. Differences between the interest roles allocated to different actors (e.g., in terms of victim, causer, and helper in the oak conflict) showed that the framing of conflicts very much depended on single actors, in particular a high profile journalist in the national newspapers and private individuals writing letters to the editor in the local newspaper.

Generic frames and tonality: Mapping a polarizing issue in a multifaceted context

This study explores the feasibility and usefulness of five generic frames (conflict, responsibility, economic consequences, human interest and morality) in analysing framing practices in a multifaceted journalistic field over time. We show that supplementing generic frames through the tonality expressed in news stories enhances analytical quality. Mapping Swiss media outlets by how they frame a highly polarizing policy, we identify different framing practices in covering the issue. Using multiple correspondence analyses, the results first show that, while cultural background and media partisanship lead to heterogeneity in how the issue is initially framed, the state’s involvement homogenizes framing practices over time. Second, unlike previous research, our study provides empirical evidence that both conflict frame and attribution of responsibility frame can measure the same underlying construct. Third, we find evidence that these two frames are strongly associated with a negative tone. Limitations and implications for future research are discussed.

‘Frame Conflicts’ in Natural Resource Use: Exploring Framings Around Arctic Offshore Petroleum Using Q‐Methodology

AbstractEnvironmental and natural resource issues are often framed in multiple ways by different stakeholders. Given their complexity, how these issues are framed can diverge significantly, leading to ‘frame conflicts’. Frame conflicts have implications for decision makers when addressing socio‐ecological problems; this is especially the case for Arctic offshore petroleum. Q‐methodology is used to explore framings found across a group of stakeholders on the issue of Arctic offshore petroleum development, to empirically demonstrate the extent of frame conflicts and to explore possible bridges for consensus between these framings. The issue was framed in various ways: a global sustainability concern, a development panacea for Arctic communities, an issue where economic reality clashes with environmental idealism and an issue centred on local sustainability concerns. Despite significant divergence across framings, some potential bridges of consensus were evident, centring on ideas of traditional livelihoods, the importance of emphasizing ‘human’ aspects of the debate and the inherent risks involved in Arctic offshore petroleum. The implications and challenges of frame conflicts around Arctic offshore petroleum are discussed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

What’s in a frame? A comparative content analysis of American, British, French, and Russian news articles

Drawing on the agenda-setting and framing literature, this quantitative content analysis examines how le Figaro, the Daily Telegraph, the New York Times, and the Moscow Times covered the Syrian war before and after the chemical weapon attack of 21 August 2013. Overall, the nationalization frame was most frequent, followed by the responsibility and conflict frames. Despite the large impact of the conflict, the morality, human interest, and economic impact frames were hardly present. Although all newspapers followed a similar pattern, the Daily Telegraph was the most heavily framed. Moreover, the stories barely provided any context while discussing several solutions largely in keeping with the suggestions of the governments. These findings raise questions about the neutrality of the newspapers and their impact on public opinion.

Framing Dynamically Changing Firm–Stakeholder Relationships in an International Dispute Over a Foreign Investment

Stakeholder literature tends to presume that effective stakeholder dialogue, occurring directly or indirectly, among a focal firm, local communities, governments, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) is desirable for successful firm–stakeholder relationships. Even if theoretically desirable, effective dialogue does not always occur. There are two key theory-informing lessons in Botnia’s Fray Bentos successful green field pulp mill investment and start-up in Western Uruguay. First, critics could not halt the project politically supported by Uruguay in an expanding multi-party international dispute. Second, the Botnia corporate communications process did not succeed in building consensus relationships, and attention was not paid to discourse creating shared meanings among all stakeholders. Participatory relationships were few, and successful dialogue was at best limited to supporters. This article uses discursive analysis to examine how newspaper and press release texts and language used therein both shaped and reflected the dynamically changing nature of firm–stakeholder relations in the Fray Bentos dispute. Despite the focal firm’s professed good intentions to create participatory relationships with its stakeholders during the building project, various stakeholders opposed the project and Botnia was caught in the crossfire of heated debate between Uruguay and Argentina. Three different frames changing over time are identified: (a) the investment frame, (b) the conflict frame, and (c) the political frame. The analysis shows that the relationships between the focal firm and stakeholders involved many meanings only partly shared, due in part to a lack of corporate appreciation for the role of language in managing firm–stakeholder relationships.

Damage Control: Media Framing of Sport Event Crises and the Response Strategies of Organizers

The hosting of major sporting events has gained favor with governments seeking to reimage their city or nation. These events are often considered a policy tool able to accelerate infrastructure development, promote tourism, and act as an economic stimulator. However, hosting a major event requires significant coordination between stakeholders and the skillful management of resources; when this does not occur a crisis may arise. The resulting negative media coverage needs to be correctly managed by organizers to mitigate any lasting damage to the reputation of the region and event. The 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games was selected as a single case study to examine the management of, and response by, event organizers to negative media coverage created by organizational crisis. The study examined 478 media news articles from media outlets with national and international distribution. Analysis explored four media frames commonly found in crisis communication: attribution of responsibility, conflict, consequences, and human interest. The result shows that the attribution of responsibility and conflict frames were the most commonly used in this case study, which is congruent with past research on preventable organizational crisis. In attempting to mitigate reputational damage, the event organizers focused on scapegoating and excuse responses. The results also indicate that the organizers did not appear to be successful in their management or containment of the media coverage of the crises.