Pollution and perception: Social visibility and local environmental mobilization

Why does local environmental degradation lead some communities to rebel while others remain politically complacent? This comparative analysis seeks a partial answer to that question through examination of the impacts of the social visibility of local environmental problems on political mobilization in the Great Lakes Basin. The data upon which this paper is based is drawn from original field research conducted in six environmentally contaminated communities in both the U.S. and Canada. The paper examines the efforts of industry, government and environmental organizations to manipulate the visibility of contaminants in order to promote or prevent the emergence of grass roots political activism. However, the data indicates that socially visible environmental disorganization increases local awareness of contamination, but has little bearing on the definition of that contamination as a problem requiring political action. The transformation of awareness of environmental problems into local political mobilization is not determined primarily by the social visibility of contaminants, their sources, or their impacts on the environment.     

CORPORATE FRAME FAILURE AND THE EROSION OF ELITE LEGITIMACY

Extant research on official frames centers on state campaigns, yet nonstate entities also utilize their own official frames. We extend the existing social movement literature by examining the unsuccessful framing efforts of a uranium mill in Cañon City, Colorado. Despite a history of environmental contamination and resultant health problems, the corporation deployed an official frame to reestablish the company's legitimacy and justify their actions following the controversy. Our data included newspaper coverage, archival documents, in‐depth interviews, and direct observation. Findings highlight critical factors that can undermine corporate official frames, and show that failed framing efforts can ultimately erode elite legitimacy.     

ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE AND LOCALLY INITIATED ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN THE NONMETROPOLITAN UNITED STATES

A community embeddedness perspective hypothesizes that nonmetropolitan localities high on entrepreneurial social infrastructure (ESI) are more successful at implementing economic development projects than those lacking ESI. ESI is a format for converting social capital into organizational forms that facilitate collective action. Logistic regression revealed that localities with projects were more likely to have an unbiased newspaper, multiple contributions by financial institutions to community projects, and more external linkages, Project communities place more emphasis on citizen involvement through civic organizations than through local government. Community-based patterns of interactions and organization are associated with successful collective economic development action.     

CYNICISM ABOUT COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT IN HONG KONG

ABSTRACT

In Hong Kong, the years since the handover of the territory to Chinese sovereignty on July 1, 1997 have been a dispirited period characterized by open cynicism toward the government. Against this widespread social discontent and dissatisfaction, the government has tried to promote social cohesion and community spirit as a way forward to resolve social conflicts. How people respond to this call for more community involvement and whether they have faith in the ability of community engagement to make a change are questions that should be addressed. This article focuses on cynicism about community engagement in terms of taking part in social services and community affairs, and explains the variation in this attitude. It is found that perceptions of social disadvantage, social trust, and the presence of dependent children have significant effects on cynical attitudes toward community engagement. This article is concluded by an argument for a “broader” definition of community responsibility that includes the fulfillment of family and work obligations, and the avoidance of passing moral judgment on burdened individuals with limited resources.     

From the New Ecological Paradigm to Total Liberation: The Emergence of a Social Movement Frame

Drawing on theories of social movements and environmental sociology, this article considers a frame transformation that is taking place within ecological social movements. This transformation produced a new frame: “total liberation.” We explore this phenomenon by analyzing interviews with activists, fieldwork observations, and documents from radical environmental and animal rights movement networks in the United States. Beyond introducing the total liberation frame, the article expands current understandings of how and why frame transformations occur through a consideration of how multiple frames, as well as intra‐ and intermovement tensions and influences, shape frame transformation.     

Petrochemical Pollution and the Suppression of Environmental Protest

While research has established how elite actors can work to protect structures that contribute to environmental harm, relatively less is known about the cultural resources that can serve elite interests at the local level. In cases of localized pollution, multiple groups have vested interests in protecting corporate legitimacy. We draw on treadmill of production theory and collective identity to analyze a case of community petrochemical contamination. Specifically, we asked: (1) how elite actors appropriated cultural resources to protect productivity following a legitimization crisis; and (2) how discursive retaliation matters in understanding the pathways to violence when protest threatens an industrial community's economic identity. Our data for this research included in-depth interviews, newspaper coverage, and archival data. Findings indicate that the corporation, the city, and corporate employees responded to local environmental activism with a discursive campaign that ultimately paved the way for widespread threats and retaliation against the residents. This research highlights the ways in which local proponents of the energy industry can take advantage of cultural resources to suppress challengers to the industry.     

NEWS IN MY BACKYARD: Media and Democracy in an "All American" City

Considerable research indicates that, at both the national and community levels, commercial news media generally fail to provide citizens with the specific information they require to hold government and public organizations accountable. This study extends research on media and democracy at the local level through a detailed content analysis of the community issue coverage of a local newspaper that serves an unusually well educated, financially secure, and politically active population. Data suggest that media do not serve democracy even in a context in which the limitations imposed by a politically disengaged audience are not present.     

Production and extrapolation of meaning in the environmental justice movement

We analyze the structural determinants of social construction processes in the environmental justice movement. We argue that initial structural conditions legitimated environmental grievances that were transformed in the 1980s into a sense of environmental injustice. Environmental injustice was produced through perceptions of: the Love Canal and Three Mile Island disasters; the Reagan administration's environmental deregulation; and continuing discoveries of contaminated communities. In the extrapolation of meaning, the grievance of environmental injustice evolved into the goal of environmental justice through interaction between grassroots environmental activists and national civil rights leaders.     

Media Constructions of Risk and Safety: Differential Framings of Hazard Events*

The media play an important role in the social construction of risk and safety. In this article, we analyze how reports in a New Orleans newspaper defined the risk and safety associated with a series of four events during the summer of 1988: a drought, low water levels in the Mississippi River, a saltwater intrusion, and toxic pollution in local bodies of water. The newspaper reports defined some of the events as hazards by assessing their negative consequences and, in turn, defined them as specific kinds of hazards by identifying their causes. Specifically, we found that the reports defined the nonlocal consequences of an event as more varied and severe than its local consequences. Further, the reports consistently defined each of the events as natural events rather than attributing their causes to social or technological events or conditions. Our results suggest the importance of news sources, economic and political power, and a preference for monocausal frames in the social construction of news. Our results also suggest the importance of local cultural world views in defining hazards and risks. We use the findings to suggest avenues for future research and theory.     

Risk and Recruitment: Patterns of Social Movement Mobilization in a Government Town

Abstract

Based on document analysis and in-depth interviews with 80 respondents, this paper examines the importance of risks associated with activism in shaping recruitment and participation patterns in a government town. Residents have a history of involvement in civil rights activism, peace activities, and environmental organizing outside their community. However, citizens have not mobilized around local environmental problems despite a 50-year legacy of contamination from nuclear weapons production. I examine two organizing efforts in the community and analyze how residents' perceptions of risk associated with activism contributed to the relative success and failure of each. I argue that risk is an important variable that is critical to our understanding of social movement recruitment and participation patterns.     

COMMUNITY INFORMATICS AND THE LOCAL STATE IN THE UK: Facilitating or assimilating an agenda for change?

The emerging discipline of community informatics (CI) has begun to trace out a distinct agenda for change in the social uses of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Focusing upon the appropriation of ICTs by local communities who have been disenfranchised by technological development, this agenda foregrounds uses of the Internet in the pursuit of distinctly community-related objectives. However, the role that the local state ought to play within this agenda for change remains marked by a degree of controversy and ambiguity. Assertions of the need for community autonomy coexist uneasily with a recognition that the local state can help develop and sustain CI. Much current work therefore focuses upon exploring notions of 'partnership' between the local state and local groups in developing CI. Against this background, this paper draws on a case study of Birmingham City Council (BCC) in order to explore a series of significant organizational changes to local government, which have seen BCC adopt a fundamentally new 'community leadership' role. This shift to community leadership is being expedited by innovative uses of Internet technology. It is argued that, rather than straightforwardly re-creating BCC as a better partner to community groups in developing CI, such changes are deeply paradoxical. In the first instance shifts to community leadership have enabled BCC to develop valuable web resources that enhance their role as a partner facilitating citizen-led CI. Conversely, however, these changes are bound up in a broader attempt by BCC to reassert managerial control at a time when its legitimacy as a social institution is being questioned. Faced with a series of external challenges, BCC has replicated important CI activities in the pursuit of its own interests. Ultimately it is argued that this assimilation of CI could eventually undermine the broader CI agenda for change.     

Power, Politics, and the Framing of Environmental Illness

The medical community, along with other government agencies, has created its own frame of environmental illness. This frame has been generally accepted by the American public. In this paper we discuss framing in general and the factors related to how the environmental illness frame has been constructed and maintained. We offer a brief history of the medical institution and illustrate the frame with its definitions of environmental illness. Qualitative data from a study of Oak Ridge, a contaminated community located in Tennessee, are examined to analyze the consequences of challenging the environmental illness frame. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Community Wildfire Events as a Source of Social Conflict*

Abstract The literature notes that natural disasters, including wildfires, that damage human settlements often have the short‐term effect of “bringing people together.” Less recognized is the fact that such events can also generate social conflict at the local level. This study examines the specific sources of such social conflict during and after community wildfire events. Examining qualitative data generated from six case studies of wildfires in the American West, we suggest that integrating the theories of Weber, Giddens, and Habermas with community interaction theory provides a context for understanding such conflict. Rationalized forms of interaction and problem solving imposed by extra‐local organizations during and after wildfire events are often resisted by local actors who are also inhibited from acting due to local capacity limitations. Thus, conflict occurs when social relations are disembedded by non‐local entities, and there is a perceived loss of local agency.     

Framing analysis of activist rhetoric: How the Sierra Club succeeds or fails at creating salient messages

Master and sub frames used by the Sierra Club to communicate with its members and the public were identified in Sierra Club chapter newsletters, regional and national newspapers via content analysis to identify the occurrence of message frames and sources.Frames in three areas – drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), coal-fired power plants (CFPP), and sprawl – were analyzed. Sprawl was the most mentioned subject in all three media. Sierra Club themes were found infrequently, suggesting the need to focus frames. But, Sierra Club frames appeared with greater frequency than competing frames. Environmental sources were the majority in the sampled articles, suggesting the opportunity for powerful framing of public opinion, with focused message frames and trained environmental spokespeople at all levels, i.e., national, regional, local.New theoretical ground for public relations scholarship is opened and findings could influence message strategies of activist and corporate or government organizations.     

MUSIC,SONG, AND THE CREATION OF COMMUNITY AND COMMUNITY SPIRIT BY A GAY SUBCULTURE

This study looks at the formation of community and the social construction of bridges between communities and the resulting networks. This is accomplished by using a phenomenological approach looking at individual experiences and comparing those against the backdrop of a classical theoretical approach to community. Specifically the study looks at the characteristics of an urban gay choir and its interactions with other communities within their city. The analysis looks towards a better understanding of community bridges and community interaction for a greater cohesion of the public at large and social solidarity development from the standpoint of a marginalized community.     

Breaking free from siloes: intersectionality as a collective action frame to address toxic exposures and reproductive health

ABSTRACT

There has been increasing interest in collaborative approaches between the environmental justice (EJ) and reproductive justice (RJ) movements to address the higher burden of toxic exposures and associated reproductive health outcomes in vulnerable communities. This study examined the collective action frames (CAFs) of advocates at the EJ/RJ nexus. CAFs highlight how advocates identify problems and solutions, and motivate action. The use of intersectionality was identified as a main CAF used in three key ways: breaking free from identity-based, issue-based, and movement-based siloes. First, interviewees described breaking free from identity-based siloes by identifying risks of toxic exposures that result from intersecting social locations (e.g. gender, race/ethnicity, income, immigration status) and by equally prioritizing multiple aspects of their identities as they engage in advocacy. Second, they described breaking free from issue-based siloes by developing multi-issue agendas that address a complex web of interrelated problems impacting health. Third, they described breaking free from movement-based siloes by developing cross-movement collaborations to address issues of mutual concern. Among multiple reasons given for cross-movement collaborations, advocates perceived them as valuable in order to disrupt social, political, and economic power imbalances that shape environmental reproductive health inequities, as well as other health and social inequities. Based on these findings, we suggest that intersectionality is a master frame, and thus may be useful to advocates in other social movements addressing intersectional issues. Understanding an intersectionality frame can help to inform advocacy approaches to promote health and health equity, particularly those focused on policies and structural drivers of health.     

Overfishing,social problems,and ecosocial sustainability in Senegalese fishing communities

ABSTRACT

This study explores living conditions of people in Senegalese fishing communities in relation to environmental change and unregulated fishing by foreign boats, weakening local opportunities and increasing forced migration of youth, creating problems for the future development of local fishery communities. It employs a postcolonial perspective and analyzes data collected through interviews with individuals from Senegalese fishing communities, social workers and relevant documents. The results show local reactions based on alliances between social workers and local community members to overfishing and the need for national and global structural changes. It is argued that EU’s fishing agreements with Senegalese government is one of the reasons behind youths’ forced migration to EU countries and that the betterment of the living conditions of fishery communities in Senegal requires not only already emerging alliances between social workers and local community members, but also national and global structural changes to protect Africa’s fishing communities and local fisheries.     

Adjudicating Frame Shifts and Frame Disputes in the New Millennial University: The Role of the Dean

This paper argues that sociological theory provides a sound basis for analyzing the social organization and reorganization of the college or university and for guiding the activities of the college dean. Frame analysis theory, developed in the study of social movements, and the attendant concepts of frame shifts and frame disputes, are drawn on to facilitate understanding of the organizational change being experienced by many comprehensive universities today. Various university constituencies proffer sometimes competing frames that can be characterized as “old school” vs. “new school” or “theoretical” vs. “practical,” yet collective and at least moderately harmonious action is required to attend to the tasks at hand. More specifically, the processes of frame alignment detailing the way that the frames held by various individuals and groups link to larger frames, offer a valuable theoretical tool for a dean. The dean’s task is one of adjudicating frame disputes within the college, navigating frame shifts in the university and reframing the concerns of the college to both internal and external audiences. The author concludes that the use of frame analysis demonstrates that sociological theory can be a vital contributor to the leadership of colleges and universities and to leaders’ understanding of the changes occurring therein.     

Bioenergy Futures: Framing Sociotechnical Imaginaries in Local Places

Sociotechnical imaginaries are collectively imagined forms of social life reflected in the design and fulfillment of technological projects. While it is implied that there may be contention around sociotechnical imaginaries, the literature on how that contention is manifested is scant. We use a frame‐analytic approach to demonstrate the potency of collective action frames for making sense of the national imaginaries underpinning siting proposals. As a case study, we use woody biomass bioenergy development in northern Michigan. After briefly outlining the multiple frames that are encompassed in the imaginary of bioenergy development, we focus on the “wood for energy” frame, employing the concept of “frame keys” to demonstrate how national imaginaries are interpreted differently by local and nonlocal actors involved in community sitings of proposed facilities. We find not only that frame keys are essential to how the national imaginary of bioenergy is interpreted, (re)produced, and responded to but also that framing processes are related to social movements that coalesce around competing collective memories of place.     

OFFICIAL FRAMES IN SOCIAL MOVEMENT THEORY: The FBI, HUAC, and the Communist Threat in Hollywood

Social movement researchers acknowledge that frames promoted by state managers compete in intense framing contests with collective action frames promoted by social movement entrepeneurs. But they have not analyzed the construction and promotion of these "official frames.'The FBI framing of the communist threat in Hollywood during the 1940s is examined and the limits of the countersubversive anticommunist master frame are explored. State agencies are established as signifying agents, and the construction and promotion of official frames is compared to similar processes for collective action frames.