Framing Contests Research Articles

From farms to fuel tanks: Stakeholder framing contests and entrepreneurship in the emergent U.S. biodiesel market

Research SummaryAlthough scholarship has demonstrated that market categories offer important signals to entrepreneurs about which goods and services are valued, little research has considered how entrepreneurs make sense of and exploit opportunities when contestation over category meaning persists. Using the emergent U.S. biodiesel market as a context, we present a framework to explain how the salience of different stakeholder frames shapes entrepreneurs' perceptions of market opportunities and influences their market‐entry strategies. By showing how framing contests affect entrepreneurial outcomes, this study illuminates the underlying cognitive mechanisms that impact market meaning and offers important implications for the literatures on entrepreneurship, market‐category evolution, framing contests, and grand challenges.Managerial SummaryEntrepreneurs entering new markets must consider how their products or services create value for customers. What customers value, however, is often shaped by competition between different stakeholders who seek to define problems and appropriate solutions. We argue and find that competing stakeholders influence what becomes valued in the market and shape the technologies and products developed by entrepreneurs. From the perspective of those promoting new markets, market growth requires a balancing act between maintaining control over market definitions and attracting new customers. In growing a new market, entrepreneurs and market pioneers may unintentionally attract other stakeholders who seek to alter or redefine market meanings, which can drive demand away from initial producers, foster the development and adoption of unforeseen technologies, and facilitate market entry of diverse organizations.

Fracking the Future: The Temporal Portability of Frames in Political Contests

Despite scientific consensus on the need to rapidly decarbonize economic systems to limit global warming, the exploitation of fossil fuels continues unabated. This begs the question, why do we continue down this path? We argue that one reason is the way in which fossil fuel expansion is temporally framed. In this article, we examine the disputed development of hydraulic fracturing of shale gas (‘fracking’) in the United Kingdom. Through analysis of a series of public inquiries conducted by the UK Government we show how industry, government and NGOs have engaged in a framing contest in debating the future of fracking. The findings show how the framing of fossil fuel development was solidified over time through processes of certainty, simplicity and familiarity. We contribute by: (a) showing how actors mobilize temporality in constructing persuasive and actionable frames; (b) developing a theory of how frames gain temporal portability – a chronology between a dominant past and a recognized future; and (c) providing an alternative theory of short-termism in explaining the path leading us to a dangerous climate changed future.

Frame contestation and collective securitisation: the case of EU energy policy

Has the European Commission become an agent of collective securitisation in EU energy policy? We argue that EU energy policy has seen repeated collective and national securitisation moves directed in particular at Russian gas exports to the EU. However, as energy is a commodity which can be framed as a security, market or even environmental issue, (thick) collective securitisation outcomes have been contested. Most EU member states accept national and Commission-driven security discourses at the policy proposal stage, but have sought to scale down the scope of (extraordinary) measures taken in response. Consequently, the ambiguity of security in relation to energy has meant that the Commission, instead of insisting on collective securitisation outcomes, has interwoven both economic security and market frames. This has provided member states with enough leeway to push for integration dynamics according to their own national prerogatives. This study pays particular attention to the EU’s Energy Union proposals and their contestation by the European Parliament and member states.

Framing conflicts in digital and transnational media environments

This article provides an overview of established and emerging approaches to frame analysis as a tool for analysing dynamics of political conflicts. It first surveys the approaches taken by contributors to this special issue and notes some implications for further research. The second part of the article then outlines four ways in which digital platforms and transnational information flows might influence the way framing contests play out in current and future media environments. These include: (1) fragmentation within media systems; (2) increasing transnational information flows that potentially create transnational publics; (3) altered framing processes and effects in the more complex networked environments; and (4) architectures and emerging logics of digital platforms. The authors believe these four factors will become crucial for understanding the connections between frame competition and political conflicts.

Exposing the Contested Frames in Strategy Work: Using Visuals to Bridge the Contested Frames

There is scant research that pinpoints to the influence framing contests exerts on the sense-making phase of strategy work. Contrary to the foregoing literature on SAP, this paper attempts to draw ...

The framing contest unravelled: Mayors, framing strategies and political outcomes in the wake of three riot‐related crises in the Netherlands

This study seeks to unravel meaning making and framing contests of mayors in the aftermath of riot‐related crises in the Netherlands. Approaching crisis exploitation as a process sensitive phenomena allowed us to analyse framing strategies and how they coincide with particular political outcomes, while taking into account the different stages of the aftermath during which framing strategies may shift. In contrast to theoretical assumptions, findings of our multiple case study suggest no pattern between the use of a specific framing strategy by the mayor and their success in terms of political outcomes. Instead, our findings suggest that contextual factors, including official inquiries, time spend in office and media pressure, could explain variation in framing dynamics and political outcomes.

Frame Contest of Foreign Policy: Who Influences Whom in South Korea?

Unlike under authoritarian rule in South Korea, the autonomy of political actors has increased vastly over the years since democratization in 1987. Moreover, diversified participants of policy‐making beyond political entities, including the media, interest groups, and civil society, have become an important variable to the policy‐making process. From the beginning of his candidacy, President Roh Moo‐hyun called for changes to the policy towards the United States, and his continuous efforts to persuade diverse actors brought about controversies throughout his term. Policies that deviated from past administrations triggered criticisms from his political opposition, while policies similar to the past administrations prompted disapproval from his supporters. This study attempts to explain how the political actors during the Roh administration framed certain issues to gain the upper hand in foreign policy. I have selected issues that drew great social attention and controversies (such as troop dispatch to Iraq and wartime operational control transition) and conducted vector autoregression analysis to empirically analyze the reciprocal relationship among the president, the National Assembly, and the media. As a result, this study was able to highlight their reciprocal relationship depending on the foreign‐policy goals – national interest or national prestige – on the nature of policy prosecution, either passive or proactive, and on the urgency of policy enforcement.

Dual Roles and Blurred Identities: A Framing Contest between Professional Associations in a Local Strategic Action Field

This paper examines professional associations’ local responses to global demands of audit standardization. Our longitudinal study from 1998 to 2018 analyses how professional associations of the German audit profession engaged in an intense framing contest over the adoption of external quality controls. Drawing on the concept of strategic action field and the literature on framing, we unpack how the gap between large audit firms and small audit firms increasingly undermined the capacity of the traditional professional associations to fulfill their dual role of governance and representation. We unveil how their failed attempt to maintain the image of a single, unified profession ultimately led to the creation of a new professional association representing the “small auditor” professional, which successfully, albeit temporarily, took control over the field of German auditing. Our findings suggest that the passivity of small audit firms in the process of translating global modes of audit regulation should not be presumed. Rather, we provide insight into how small audit firms can rebuild their own distinct identity by actively responding to waves of global audit regulation. Doing so, and contrary to prior research, our case suggests that governance units within strategic action fields are not necessarily aligned with the interests of the most powerful field actors.

Mobile apps and news: a Taiwanese case of curation

ABSTRACTThe smartphone has been widely accepted as a platform wherein users not only interact with their friends but also seek information through its applications. Apps also provide a way for traditional news media to attract audiences who have transferred their interest to digital media. This project explores the use of mobile apps in Taiwanese news media in attracting traditional mass media audiences and examines the impact of mobile apps on journalism. Relevant concepts, such as frame contest, agenda setting, and gatekeeping, will be examined; digital curation is introduced as well to integrate the aforementioned theories. In-depth interviews were employed as the research method. The 12 interviewees are practitioners who manage the use of mobile apps in 12 different news agencies. The findings show that the agenda-setting process has changed because of audience influence. The role of agencies is now more curator and less traditional agenda setter in Taiwanese context.

Covert action failure and fiasco construction: William Hague’s 2011 Libyan venture

ABSTRACT In 2011 William Hague, then British Foreign Secretary, authorized Special Forces to enter Libya and contact rebels opposed to Muammar Gaddafi in the unfolding civil war. However, its members were detained by the rebels and ejected from the country. This article puts the literature on public policy failures into dialogue with that on covert action as a tool of foreign policy. It asks: why did this not develop into a fully fledged policy fiasco when journalists and politicians judged it to have been a major error of judgement on Hague’s part? Using narrative analysis of the contemporary reporting of this incident, we argue that the government – possessing the advantage of information asymmetry accruing from operational secrecy – was able to win the battle of narratives in a frame contestation process. The article reflects on how the study of information asymmetry can enhance the recently revivified research into foreign policy failures.

Framing the Immigration Policy Agenda

This study applies a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) design to examine how configurations of quantitative and qualitative aspects of media coverage associate with changes on the policy agenda. We analyze media coverage of sixteen focusing events related to Dutch immigration policies—an intractable policy controversy that is regularly under media scrutiny. In addition to the quantity of media attention, we take into account whether dominant framing in media coverage is contesting the current policy frame and whether the framing in the media is consonant. Our analysis indicates that frame contestation is a necessary condition for media effects. Quantity of media attention and frame consonance are relevant indicators of changes on the policy agenda only when the majority of media coverage is contesting the current policy frame. Furthermore, we found that in the case of intractable policy controversies, media framing can create specific dynamics, such as “David versus Goliath” dynamics where human-interest framing of a single case challenges current policy, or “negotiation dynamics” where competing managerialist frames negotiate policy solutions. An integration of framing and agenda-setting literatures helps develop a better understanding of the occurrence of media effects on the policy agenda and how this effect takes shape in the case of intractable policy controversies.

Policy Conflict Framework

This essay introduces a Policy Conflict Framework to guide and organize theoretical, practical, and empirical research to fill the vacuum that surrounds policy conflicts. The framework centers on a conceptual definition of an episode of policy conflict that distinguishes between cognitive and behavioral characteristics. The cognitive characteristics of a policy conflict episode include divergence in policy positions among two or more actors, perceived threats from opponents’ policy positions, and unwillingness to compromise. These cognitive characteristics manifest in a range of behavioral characteristics (e.g., framing contests, lobbying, building networks). Episodes of policy conflicts are shaped by a policy setting, which consists of different levels of action where conflicts may emerge (political, policy subsystem and policy action situations), interpersonal and intrapersonal policy actor attributes, events, and the policy issue. In turn, the outputs and outcomes of policy conflicts produce feedback effects that shape the policy setting. This essay ends with an agenda for advancing studies of policy conflicts, both methodologically and theoretically.

Why Framing National Identity Fails: A Case Study of the Anti-Moral and National Education Movement in Hong Kong

As the first large-scale student movement in Hong Kong since 1997, the Anti-Moral and National Education Movement in 2012 forced the government to shelve its bid to legitimate Chinese national identity through education and exacerbated the identity crisis in this post-colonial society. Through a case study on this movement, we examine the movement–identity dynamics and discuss the meaning of being Chinese in Hong Kong. Viewing social movements as dialogic processes bounded by actors’ ‘background expectancies’, we focus on how the framing contest between activists, media and the government led to the success of this campaign. For Chinese in Hong Kong there are two areas of potential tension: the boundary between ‘them’ and ‘us’; and the congruence between democratic local/periphery and the authoritarian national/centre. Any attempt to legitimate Chinese national identity in Hong Kong would be hamstrung by a failure to address these tensions ingrained in the identity crisis.

Framing Climate Change Loss and Damage in UNFCCC Negotiations

How does an idea emerge and gain traction in the international arena when its underpinning principles are contested by powerful players? The adoption in 2013 of the Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage as part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) puzzled observers, because key state parties, such as the United States, had historically opposed the policy. This article examines the roles of frame contestation and ambiguity in accounting for the evolution and institutionalization of the “loss and damage” norm within the UNFCCC. The article applies frame analysis to the data from coverage of the negotiations and elite interviews. It reveals that two competing framings, one focused on liability and compensation and the other on risk and insurance, evolved into a single, overarching master frame. This more ambiguous framing allowed parties to attach different meanings to the policy that led to the resolution of differences among the parties and the embedding of the idea of loss and damage in international climate policy.

Framing analysis, dramatism and terrorism coverage: politician and press responses to the Madrid airport bombing

The media and terrorism is an area that has attracted researchers’ attention in looking at the strategic dimensions of framing. This paper combines both Entman’s framing theory (and his ‘cascading activation’ model for analysis of framing contests) with a dramatistic approach to rhetoric (the Burkean concepts of the pentad and ratios) to see whether connections can be made that help provide a better understanding of the phenomenon of interactions between politicians’ words and media reactions to those words. Speeches given by the Spanish Prime Minister and the official opposition in reaction to a terrorist attack in Madrid are analysed. Our empirical analysis shows a highly fragmented capacity for cultural resonance, and a ‘two sided context’ with two very different interpretations of the situation. Our findings demonstrate that an appreciation of the dramatistic approach to rhetoric enhances our comprehension of people’s motives for adopting or rejecting the different frames used by leaders (politicians and the media) as they seek to frame issues for a range of purposes. They also suggest that combining approaches from the humanities and the social sciences by emphasizing motives as a key variable for the dynamics of framing contests might open up interesting avenues for research on framing as also on the relations between symbols and actions.

Spanish

The tragedy of the fire at the ABC nursery happened in Hermosillo, Sonora on 2009, at an electoral context as an independent variable, altered political speeches and electoral agendas. In this scenario, the tragedy became a political battle, where each actor positioned within a coalition, drew up discursive interpretation frameworks in response to the tragedy, trying to place them as the dominant narrative to the electorate and the media. In this frame contest, each actor and coalition exploited the crisis based on their goals, whether to get rid of responsibility, direct it to someone particular or tip the balance of the vote to a party, falling in to opportunist games. Manipulation and information omission influenced on the positions in not ruling for significative changes on policies related with social security child care and civil protection, fact that hindered crisis internalization and learning

Good citizenship as a frame contest: Kony2012, memes, and critiques of the networked citizen

The rise of networked media has brought new opportunities and challenges for individuals’ engagement with politics. Some scholars propose that norms around “good citizenship” are evolving as well. Yet, little attention has been paid to how those debates play out in everyday cultural understandings. Drawing on the case of Kony2012, a highly visible social change campaign, we illustrate how perceptions of good citizenship can be understood as a contest between frames, one conducted not only by elites but also by individuals as they create and spread user-generated content. Using the theoretical lens of the frame contest, we contrast the hopeful image of the “networked citizen,” presented in the Kony2012 campaign, with counter-frames of “slacktivism,” presented in memes circulated in response to the campaign and its supporters. We posit the frame contest as a mechanism through which to understand how conceptions of good citizenship may change over time.

Who Prevails in the Visual Framing Contest about the United Nations Climate Change Conferences?

The annual Climate Change Conferences (Conferences of the Parties, COPs) held under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change are global staged political media events that regularly provide occasions for contesting the framing of global warming in media coverage around the globe. This study assesses which professional group involved in communicating the COPs—journalists, government spokespeople, and representatives from non-governmental organizations (NGOs)—is most successful in seeing their visual framing conceptions represented in mainstream print media coverage. Our analysis combines data from 44 semi-structured interviews with actors from these groups conducted on-site at the COPs in Doha, Qatar (2012) and Warsaw, Poland (2013) with a content analysis of climate change news published in newspapers from five democratic countries around the world. Results show a relative prevalence of NGO-preferred visual framing in COP coverage. Through providing powerful pictures of symbolic actions, civil society actors can prevail in the visual framing contest under certain conditions, but it is much harder for them to circumvent the usually strong statist orientation of mainstream news media in sourcing textual messages.

Rights, Economics, or Family?Frame Resonance, Political Ideology, and the Immigrant Rights Movement

Although social movement scholars in the United States have long ignored activism over immigration, this movement raises important theoretical and empirical questions, especially given many immigrants’ lack of citizenship. Is the rights “master” frame, used extensively by other US social movements, persuasive in making claims for noncitizens? If not, which other movement frames resonate with the public? We leverage survey experiments—largely the domain of political scientists and public opinion researchers—to examine how much human/citizenship rights, economics, and family framing contests shape Californians’ views about legalization and immigrants’ access to public benefits. We pay particular attention to how potentially distinct “pub lics,” or subgroups, react, finding significant differences in frame resonance between groups distinguished by political ideology. However, alternative framings resonate with—at best—one political subgroup and, dauntingly, frames that resonate with one group sometimes alienate others. While activists and political theorists may hope that human rights appeals can expand American notions of membership, such a frame does not help the movement build support for legalization. Instead, the most expansive change in legalization attitudes occurs when framed as about family unity, but this holds only among self-reported conservatives. These findings underscore the challenges confronting the immigrant movement and the need to reevaluate the assumption that historically progressive rights language is effective for immigrant claims-making. When making claims for immigrants, which frames are most resonant for ordinary Americans? Social movement scholars have long argued that activists can

Frame Decoupling for Organizational Change

Using qualitative research in one organization that undertook green building, we examine the processes that occur to foster support for a new initiative among people with diverse values and perceptions. We found that framing was particularly important, but framing contests occurred due to variation in how individuals cognitively connected different frames together. To overcome these contests, the organization used an interactive process we define as “frame decoupling” through which the frames were identified, separated, and prioritized before new language or frame was selected for the collective organizational goal. We develop the concept “Frame Decoupling” to describe how variations in cognitive diagnostic framing by stakeholders within an organization contribute to framing contests and how these contests can be resolved through interactive processes that effectively decouple various preexisting frames. Frame decoupling is an additional frame alignment strategy that social movements and organizations can use to motivate support and action for organizational goals.