Recipes for Attention: Policy Reforms,Crises, Organizational Characteristics,and the Newspaper Coverage of the LGBT Movement, 1969–2009

Why do some organizations in a movement seeking social change gain extensive national newspaper coverage? To address the question, we innovate in theoretical and empirical ways. First, we elaborate a theoretical argument that builds from the political mediation theory of movement consequences and incorporates the social organization of newspaper practices. This media and political mediation model integrates political and media contexts and organizations' characteristics and actions. With this model, we hypothesize two main routes to coverage: one that includes changes in public policy and involves policy‐engaged, well‐resourced, and inclusive organizations and a second that combines social crises and protest organizations. Second, we appraise these arguments with the first analysis of the national coverage of all organizations in a social movement over its career: 84 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights and AIDS‐related organizations in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal from 1969 to 2010. These analyses go beyond previous research that provides either snapshots of many organizations at one point in time or overtime analyses of aggregated groups of organizations or individual organizations. The results of both historical and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analyses support our media and political mediation model.     

Life politics,nature and the state: Giddens' sociological theory and The Politics of Climate Change

Anthony Giddens' The Politics of Climate Change represents a significant shift in the way in which he addresses ecological politics. In this book, he rejects the relevance of environmentalism and demarcates climate‐change policy from life politics. Giddens addresses climate change in the technocratic mode of simple rather than reflexive modernization. However, Giddens' earlier sociological theory provides the basis for a more reflexive understanding of climate change. Climate change instantiates how, in high modernity, the existential contradiction of the human relationship with nature returns in new form, expressed in life politics and entangled with the structural contradictions of the capitalist state. The interlinking of existential and structural contradiction is manifested in the tension between life politics and the capitalist nation‐state. This tension is key for understanding the failures so far of policy responses to climate change.     

Scientization: putting global climate change on the scientific agenda and the role of the IPCC

Since the 1970s, climate change has dominated the international scientific and political agenda. In particular, the foundation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change at the end of the 1980s played a major role for the further enhancement of efforts in the field of climate change sciences. However, to understand the interaction of the worldwide coordination of climate change sciences as well as the role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its consequences, it is worthwhile to take a look at the self-conception of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s tasks and work. This paper gives an idea of the history of international climate change science, its representation in public discourse and the role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by comprehensively illustrating its tasks, organization and self-image. Furthermore, the article tries to argue that the hitherto accepted concept of science followed within this body fails to integrate the idea of scientific ethics. It can be concluded that the conception of science represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has heavily influenced worldwide attention to climate change, its becoming part of the political agenda as well as the ethical consequences.     

The Road Through Paris: Climate Change,Carbon, and the Political Dynamics of Convergence

Abstract

This article tracks the key events that set the stage for the 21st Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21) in Paris, particularly as they relate to politics of convergence. One side of this coming together is an intersection of issues, where new terrestrial and aquatic carbon sequestration programs have blurred the margins of climate change mitigation and resource grabbing. These programs, enclosing forests, farmlands, and oceans, are likewise fused together in what can be described as an emerging ‘carbon complex’ that is part of the wider blue/green economy. On the reverse side, the clear intersection of issues as witnessed by radical, and historically sectoral, agrarian/social justice movements is causing them to intertwine in resistance. The realm of climate change has proven to be an exceptional space of struggle and countermovement building. Political interactions between movements have become increasingly sophisticated—requiring frameworks that address environmental, agrarian, and oceanic issues at once, as the issues have become ever more complex. Agrarian/social justice movements maintain that their agendas for food sovereignty and climate justice hinge upon exposing fault lines in the system and advocate overall system change. COP21 and its parallel side events were together a landmark moment, but part of a much more involved process, ‘the road through Paris’, along which movements had carved out transnational and local spaces of convergence against the backdrop of a global carbon complex.     

Action,Technology, and the Homogenisation of Place: Why Climate Change is Antithetical to Political Action

According to Hannah Arendt, the concept of ‘political action’ is a fundamental component of the human condition because it encapsulates how the uniqueness of each human being intersects to create unpredictable political initiatives and effects. Recently, despite being one of the most daunting political challenges ever faced by humanity, there has been a noted collective action failure, or inaction, concerning the global threat of anthropogenic climate change. Why? This article seeks to explain this political inaction in a new way: by examining the metaphysical role that technology plays in disclosing the climate as a thinkable and global object. After applying the philosophy of Martin Heidegger to the complex mathematical general circulation models (GCMs) used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), this article details how the metaphysics underlying GCMs manifests the perceivable world by ‘enframing’ it, or by implicitly representing subjects, objects, and Nature itself, as a predictable, calculable, and orderable relation of static forces. When this metaphysical and mathematical uniformity constructs the climate as a calculable object that is globalised through the IPCC, it is ultimately found to be contradictory to the distinctness and unpredictability necessary for distinct human action to occur. Paradoxically, therefore, political action is argued to be metaphysically antithetical to the technologically enframed science, politics, and discourse, of global climate change itself. The importance of distinct and plural human places, when filtered through GCMs, becomes subsumed by the climate as a homogenous, calculative, and politically inactive, global object.     

Climate Change and Societal Response: Livelihoods,Communities, and the Environment

Climate change may be considered a natural disaster evolving in slow motion on a global scale. Increasing storm intensities, shifting rainfall patterns, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and other manifold alterations are being experienced around the world. Climate has never been constant in any location, but human‐induced changes associated with greenhouse gases and fossil fuel use are new and rapidly shifting conditions for rural communities and regions across the planet. Rural sociologists have long been carving out the contours of this topic through research on family well‐being, rural livelihoods, community, and the environment. Now climate change and subsequent policy responses present a new and fundamental source of social change. The purpose of this article is to assess lines of research and theory that consider and direct our understanding of the impacts of climate change, the ways it might be mitigated, and the coping strategies of rural people and communities that are both victims and perpetrators in the global realignment. As climate‐change impacts and policy responses begin to impinge on rural populations, the first line of resistance and participation will be the rural community. The distribution of rewards from climate‐change mitigation is broad and diffuse; the distribution of costs, compromised livelihoods, and community disruption often is focused.     

Evaluating Climate Migration

Climate change will negatively impact human communities and ecosystems, including driving increased food insecurity, increased exposure to disease, loss of livelihood and worsening poverty. Recent climate debates have focused attention on climate migrants, people who are displaced by the ecological stresses caused by climate change. To date, these debates have focused a great deal of attention on state security issues and have left the gender implications largely unexplored. In this article we examine the securitization of climate migration debates through gender lenses. We find that gender helps reveal and focus attention on the human security implications of climate migration and offers a useful discourse for climate policymaking.     

Media,Politics and Climate Change: Towards a New Research Agenda

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time, and the media have been demonstrated to play a key role in shaping public perceptions and policy agendas. Journalists are faced with multiple challenges in covering this complex field. This article provides an overview of existing research on the media framing of climate change, highlighting major research themes and assessing future potential research developments. It argues that analysis of the reporting of climate science must be placed in the wider context of the growing concentration and globalization of news media ownership, and an increasingly ‘promotional culture’, highlighted by the rapid rise of the public relations industry in recent years and claims‐makers who employ increasingly sophisticated media strategies. Future research will need to examine in‐depth the targeting of media by a range of actors, as well as unravel complex information flows across countries as media increasingly converge.     

Worlds apart,worlds together: converging and diverging frames in climate and energy governance

This paper argues that past research has overlooked how the way problems and solutions are framed contribute to a prevailing gap in the global governance of climate and energy. Empirically, this paper investigates the frames of energy and climate change as expressed in key documents from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and International Energy Agency (IEA). Partly in contrast to past research, this paper finds (1) that there is a growing similarity in how the IPCC and IEA frame climate and energy; (2) that the IEA has gone from ignoring to acknowledging climate change and the transformation to a low-carbon energy system; and (3) that there is a prevailing difference in emphasis, whereas the IPCC only marginally discuss energy, while the IEA is still mainly talking about energy needs and fossil fuels even if climate change and renewables have entered their agenda.     

Cultural Preservation of the Sea Island Gullah: A Black Social Movement in the Post-Civil Rights Era

Abstract Historians have long noted the existence of many rural Souths in lieu of the single rural monolith noted by Cash. Analysis, then, must be done on local and not solely on regional issues. Morris (1984) chronicled the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement. His thesis is that indigenous community groups were linked together by black church leadership and were recruited by national movement organizations (e.g., NAACP, SCLC). The thesis of this article is that after the Civil Rights Movement, small black social movements emerged to address issues in local areas. These new, emerging social movement organizations differed with the Civil Rights Movement in terms of leadership, formalization, goals, and tactics. We treat the emergence of the Sea Island Gullah in South Carolina and Georgia as an example of one such movement. From Reconstruction to the Depression, the descendents of slaves lived in isolated settlements on the remote sea islands. During this time, they reestablished a culture with authentic African components and developed mechanisms to transmit the culture to other islands. By the late 1970s, the land base for the culture (small farming and fishing) was threatened by land developers. A social movement organization was formed by movement entrepreneurs with the help of white and black volunteers. This movement has aided small farmers who have lost their land to tax reassessments. It has also sought to reestablish agriculture in the Sea Islands and promote the Gullah culture.     

Beyond Denialism: Think Tank Approaches to Climate Change

Sociologists have done important research documenting the key role that think tanks play in the climate change denialism movement in the United States, which has sought to mislead the American public about the realities of global warming. Sociologists have not, however, assessed the full range of ways that think tanks are responding to – or planning for – global environmental change. This article proposes a typology of elite responses to global warming, which goes beyond denialism to include (i) limited climate mitigation, (ii) climate adaptation/privileged accommodation, and (iii) climate opportunism. Ultimately, this article provides insights on ways to build upon previous research in both environmental and political sociology to study the interface between elite‐driven policy, climate change, and capitalism.     

Solar Festivals and Climate Bills: Comparing NGO Climate Change Campaigns in the UK and Australia

This paper compares climate change campaigns conducted by environmental nongovernment organizations (NGOs) in the United Kingdom (UK) and Australia. The NGOs represent a diversity of political access, financial resources, and international connections. Three campaign activities common to both countries undertaken between 2004 and 2006 are analyzed for their effectiveness via interviews and document review. This examination is embedded within an analysis of the political, economic, policy, and social contexts of each country. It is shown that in the UK climate change has been used as a pivotal leadership issue, that the fossil fuel industry’s influence is not predominant, and that NGOs enjoy political legitimacy. Whereas, in Australia climate change has only recently emerged as a political priority, the fossil fuel industry has had significant political and financial influence, and NGO advocacy has been marginalized. It is argued that NGOs are embedded in the political and policy contexts of their country, and the greatest campaign traction and NGO influence can only be achieved when these contexts provide favorable conditions.

How Civil Society Organizations Foster Insurgent Citizenship: Lessons from the Brazilian Landless Movement

This paper describes how the Brazilian Landless Movement fostered an insurgent citizenship among the poor. We describe three core organizational practices of this movement that supported this insurgent citizenship. We find that these practices bear striking resemblance to the practices of other civil society organizations (CSOs), including social service organizations, when they support the empowerment of marginalized communities. The identification of common practices suggests that despite the differences among CSOs, these distinctions may be less stark than assumed and that there may be common causal pathways between CSOs and insurgent citizenship.     

From Non-Believer to Believer: What Leads People to Change Their Climate Views

Studies have highlighted the political, economic, and psychological factors in the debate over anthropogenic climate change—a hegemony approach—but have rarely focused on the stories and possibilities of people's transitions from climate change non-believer to climate change believer. Based on publicly accessible narratives, this study examines the stories of those who have switched from non-believer to believer—a narrative approach—and the dilemmas involved in those switches. Our investigation illuminates that a transition to climate change believer is a cultural and moral matter based on changing social relations of knowledge and what people regard as ignorable. We find that narratives of transition commonly describe interrelated shifts in three social relational factors: the narrator's notions of self, material reality, and justice. We term this contextualized transformative experience a relational rupture. Our narrative approach thus contextualizes climate change denialism within a person's web of social relations, not the hegemony of climate change communication alone. Moreover, we suggest that, since public debate and polarization on scientific topics such as climate change, vaccination, and COVID-19 are socially situated, they may potentially be socially bridged.     

The Endangered Arctic,the Arctic as Resource Frontier: Canadian News Media Narratives of Climate Change and the North

The Arctic is one of the most radically altered parts of the world due to climate change, with significant social and cultural impacts as a result. Using discourse network analysis and qualitative textual analysis of articles published in the Globe and Mail and National Post during the period 2006 to 2010, we identify and analyze key frames that interpret the implications of climate change on the Arctic. We examine Canadian national news media coverage to ask: How does the Arctic enter media coverage of climate change? Is there evidence of a climate justice discourse in relation to regional disparities in the risks and harms of climate change between northern and southern Canada? Climate change in the Arctic is often framed through the lens of Canadian national interests, which downplays climate‐related social impacts that are already occurring at subnational political and geographical scales. L'Arctique est une des régions du monde la plus radicalement altérée par le changement climatique, menant comme résultat des importants changements sociaux et culturels. En utilisant l'analyse des réseaux de discours ainsi que l'analyse textuelle qualitative des articles publiés dans le Globe and Mail et le National Post de 2006 à 2010, nous identifions and analysons des cadres clés qui servent à interpréter les conséquences du changement climatique dans l'Arctique. Nous examinons la couverture des médias nationaux canadiens pour pouvoir demander : comment est‐ce que l'Arctique s'insère dans la couverture médiatique du changement climatique? Est‐ce qu'il y a de la preuve d'un discours de la justice climatique en relation des disparités régionales des risques et méfaits du changement climatique entre le Canada du nord et du sud? Le changement climatique dans l'Arctique est souvent encadré à travers le prisme des intérêts nationaux canadiens, ce qui minimise les impacts sociaux reliés au climat qui se produisent actuellement aux échelons sous‐nationaux politiques et géographiques.     

Lessons from the Niagara Movement: Prosopography and Discursive Protest

This article uses a case study of the Niagara Movement, which functioned from 1905–1910, to demonstrate that the use of prosopography (collective biographies) is a propitious methodological tool, particularly for those interested in the social-psychological analysis of movement actors within networks. I present a prosopography of the founders of the Niagara Movement. Learning more about the identity of political actors provides clues to the ways strategic choices are made and how collective action frames are developed. The prosopography of the Niagara Movement also provides theoretical insights into discursive processes that are often lost in studies of long movement trajectories. I analyze potential explanations for the absence of organizations such as the Niagara Movement from the civil rights canon, and, through an analysis of talk as a resource for mobilization, pinpoint directions for future researchers interested in micro theories of mobilization.     

Queering Climate Change: Exploring the Influence of LGBTQ+ Identity on Climate Change Belief and Risk Perceptions*

Although researchers have broadly addressed how race, party identification, political ideology, and binary gender categories influence climate change opinions, little attention has been paid to the relationship between sexuality and gender variance (LGBTQ+ identity broadly) and climate change perceptions. Using a quota-based survey from 2022 that approximates the US population on key demographic characteristics and oversamples LGBTQ+ individuals, we assess the degree to which LGBTQ+ individuals' climate change beliefs and risk perceptions are comparable to cisgender, heterosexual (cishet) individuals, specifically examining climate change beliefs, the perceived threat climate change poses, and worry about climate change. We argue that LGBTQ+ individuals' views are likely to be distinct from their cisgender heterosexual (cishet) counterparts for three reasons: climate change is likely to exacerbate existing structural inequalities, create disaster responses that reinforce heteronormative and discriminatory patterns, and activate LGBTQ+ political culture. We find evidence that LGBTQ+ individuals express higher agreement with climate change beliefs, identify climate change as a greater threat, and worry more about climate change when compared to their cishet counterparts.     

Negotiating Sustainability: Climate Change Framing in the Communications,Energy and Paperworkers Union

Environmental problems are often reduced to a catch‐22 that portrays sustainability‐oriented policies as disastrous for resource sector workers. Despite efforts by many industry leaders to frame climate change in “jobs versus environment” terms, the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP) has supported ambitious greenhouse gas reduction policies. Using interviews with union members and staff, this study examines CEP's climate change framing. It finds that CEP extended the environmental justice master frame to define its response to climate change, neutralize anti‐Kyoto rhetoric, and work with the environmental movement. CEP's framing was accomplished through negotiation processes that continue to unfold as members work out the union's positions relative to their own values, experiences, and interpretations of what is possible. These findings suggest sustainability can be understood as an emergent, localized, and contested social order, and point to “self‐negotiation” in longer‐term social change struggles as a potential area of further study.     

Changement climatique : Dynamiques scientifiques, expertise, enjeux géopolitiques

In less than thirty years, climate change became a both scientific and geopolitical crucial stake, concerning a great variety of research groups, epistemic communities, and political actors. An international organisation of scientific assessment- the International Panel of Climate Change (IPCC)- played a key role in the domain and tends to become a paradigmatic model for other international scientific assessments. In this paper, we wanted to analyse this evolution of climate change regime, the IPCC, and the feedbacks of this evolution in France on the climate sciences community.     

Organizational change: The role of climate and job satisfaction in child welfare workers' perception of readiness for change

BackgroundWhen organizations embark on deliberate efforts to increase effectiveness through organizational-level changes, those that demonstrate greater readiness for change tend to have better outcomes. In contrast, when the organization is not ready, a change effort may result in resistance, conflict and, eventually, failure. However, studies addressing how agency climate and job satisfaction influence workers' perception of the organization's readiness for change in child welfare or human service organizations are scarce.MethodsData for this study was obtained from a sample of 356 direct care and clinical child welfare workers employed at eight not-for-profit child welfare agencies under contract to provide a variety of services in a large northeastern state. Workers were surveyed on their agency's readiness for change, organizational climate, and job satisfaction. The Spector Job Satisfaction Survey measured nine subscales and Parker Organizational Climate survey measured four primary domains: role, job, supervision, and organizational dimensions. A confirmatory factor analysis was conducted on nine questions derived from the Organizational Readiness for Change survey that measured workers' perceptions of organizational readiness for change. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was utilized to determine climate and satisfaction influences on voluntary child welfare workers' readiness for change.ResultsThe results of SEM confirmed that the exogenous independent indicators of role ambiguity, supervisor goal emphasis, organizational innovation, satisfaction with communication, and the number of years in current position were predictive of workers' perception of readiness for change with significant positive coefficients.ImplicationsThis study highlights the importance of certain organizational climate and job satisfaction factors that child welfare workers' identify for the success of agency change efforts. Workers perceive that organizations may have a higher level of readiness to implement successful change initiatives when: (1) workers feel their role is clear, supervisors articulate change goals, and job performance is held to a high standard and is measurable; (2) agency leaders establish organizational communication that is explicate, and they encourage workers to develop ideas and try new ways of doing the job; and (3) the greater the number of years workers are in their current position, the more likely change initiatives are perceived to be successful. Most importantly, this study suggests that not all organizational climate or job satisfaction factors are recognized by workers as supporting change equally.