Social and Political Convergence on Environmental Events: The Roles of Simplicity and Visuality in the BP Oil Spill

Cet article étudie de quelle façon et à quel moment les journaux, les ONG environnementales, les entreprises privées et le gouvernement convergent autour des événements environnementaux. En utilisant les données sur le déversement de pétrole BP en 2010 tirées des journaux aux États‐Unis, au Canada et en Grande‐Bretagne et des communiqués de presses de Greenpeace, du Club Sierra, de Halliburton, de Transocean, d’Exxon/Mobil et les annonce de presse de la secrétaire de presse pour le Maison Blanche, nous étudions la capacité d'un événement à faire converger des actions sociales et politiques. En concevant les événements comme des actants, nous vérifions les arguments tirés des publications sur les mouvements sociaux et sur la définition de l'agenda politique à propos du timing, de la simplicité et de la visualité afin de comprendre comment les acteurs politiques convergent. Nous observons que l'effet de convergence est lié au timing, mais pas à la simplicité ou à la visualité. This paper examines how and when newspapers, environmental nongovernmental organizations, businesses, and the government converge on environmental events. Using data on the 2010 BP Oil Spill from newspaper articles in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, press releases by Greenpeace and Sierra Club, press releases by BP, Halliburton, Transocean, ExxonMobil, and Shell, and press statements by the White House Press Secretary, we examine an event's potential to trigger convergence of social and political action. By treating events as political actants, we examine arguments from the agenda‐setting and social movement literatures on timing, simplicity, and visuality to understand when political actors converge. We find that convergence is related to temporal cycles but not simplicity or visuality.     

Hermeneutic Institutionalism: Towards a New Synthesis

The deep methodological and substantive fragmentation of the social sciences has led to the development of theories that can think larger social wholes only at the cost of disfiguring reductionism. Any effort at creating new synthesizing frameworks must be able to integrate advances made in a wide variety of subfields, and therefore needs to reconsider the ontology of social life as a unifying basis. Given post-structuralist critiques, this has to happen in a critical fashion. Due to its anti-reductionist stance, the social hermeneutics of Vico and Herder offers a good starting point for an ontological re-orientation. However, since their work has also inspired highly problematic essentializations of culture/people as the principal way to connect everyday interaction and large-scale phenomena, a move that has been criticized for very good reasons, their social hermeneutics must be adjusted to the needs of our time. This paper proposes a renewed social hermeneutics that analyzes social life as a dense thicket of action-reaction effect flows mediated by discursive, emotive and sensory understandings. Wherever action-reaction effect flows are replicated in self-similar forms, institutions emerge. Since replication is contingent on stabilized understandings the question arises how understanding, a process, can come to be objectified as a transposable form. The answer provided here is that repeated validations in action, in comparison with other persons, and in mnemonic invocations pick out and actualize understandings as interpretative devices. But this means that the work of stabilization is deferred to another level, because stabilized understandings require enduring validation, which can only issue from institutionalized social environments. The enduring features of social life must therefore be thought of as the result of a process of institutiosis, in which institutionalized forms buttress each other. Features of institutiosis are identified, which lead to more or less stable arrangements.     

Effects of garden management practices,by different types of gardeners,on human wellbeing and ecological and soil sustainability in Swiss cities

Urban Ecosystems - Gardens have effects on the local ecology as well as on the wellbeing of the gardener, but few studies have attempted to study gardens using both ecological and social outcome...     

Communicating on Behalf of Global Civil Society: Management and Coordination of Public Relations in International Nongovernmental Organizations

In the last few decades, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have become influential actors in creating awareness of international social, political, environmental and economic causes in global society. However, NGOs have not received much attention in research on international public relations. This study contributes to filling that gap by analyzing how NGOs manage public relations according to the generic principles of excellence in global public relations and how they coordinate strategic communication between headquarters and local units. An online survey of 440 practitioners revealed 2 excellence clusters and 4 clusters of organizations with differing degrees of centralization. Excellent NGOs were found to assign more resources to public relations and more frequently considered cultural context in their communication programs. Thus, the study gives significant insights into international public relations practice in the global civil society sector and reveals further need for modifying and extending public relations theory in that respect.     

Urban ecosystems and sustainable urban development—analysing and assessing interacting systems in the Stockholm region

In order to build competence for sustainability analysis and assessment of urban systems, it is seen as essential to build on models representing urban form, landuse and transportation, urban metabolism, as well as ecological processes. This type of analysis of interacting sub-systems requires an advanced model integration platform, yet open for learning and for further development. Moreover, since the aim is to increase urban experience with ecosystem management in the wide sense, the platform needs to be open and easily available, with high visualisation capacity. For this purpose, the LEAM model was applied to the Stockholm Region and two potential future scenarios were developed, resulting from alternative policies. The scenarios differed widely and the dense urban development of Scenario Compact could be visualised, destroying much of the Greenstructure of Stockholm, while Scenario Urban Nature steered the development more to outer suburbs and some sprawl. For demonstration of the need for further development of biodiversity assessment models, a network model tied to a prioritised ecological profile was applied and altered by the scenarios. It could be shown that the Greenstructure did not support this profile very well. Thus, there is a need for dynamic models for negotiations, finding alternative solutions and interacting with other models. The LEAM Stockholm case study is planned to be further developed, to interact with more advanced transport and land use models, as well as analysing energy systems and urban water issues. This will enable integrated sustainability analysis and assessment of complex urban systems, for integration in the planning process in Stockholm as well as for comparative sustainability studies between different cities, with the goal to build more sustainable urban systems and to increase urban experiences in ecosystem management.     

Different carrots and different sticks: do we reward and punish differently than we approve and disapprove?

This paper reports lab data from four games in order to analyze and compare the motivations behind monetary punishment and reward and their non-monetary counterparts, disapproval and approval, an important question given that both types of punishment/rewards affect cooperation and norm compliance. The results in our games support the hypothesis that a motivation akin to reciprocity plays the key role for approval and disapproval whereas payoff comparisons play the key role for monetary rewards and punishment.     

Behavioral insurance: Theory and experiments

“Risk and insurance” provides an illustrative set of decisions made in the presence of uncertainty. As behavioral models become more integrated into economics and finance, many of their effects are illustrated quite well within insurance markets. Especially noteworthy are the complementary roles of theory and experiments. This article reviews the interactive role of experiments and theory in analyzing insurance demand from a behavioral perspective. We pay special attention to several models of underinvestment in insurance or in other risk-mitigation markets.     

Low-Cost-Hypothese und Rationalität

We present a basic microeconomic model that includes attitudes and implicates the Low-Cost-Hypothesis for the case of a continuous behavioral variable. Similar to arguments by Best and Kroneberg (2012) with respect to a binary behavioral variable, our model implies that the Low-Cost-Hypothesis should not be tested via regression models that explicitly include interaction terms between attitude strength and costs of attitude conformity. By two applications from environmental sociology – willingness to pay for forest biodiversity and donations for animal protection – it is demonstrated that this best practice approach of testing the Low-Cost-Hypothesis might result in its rejection, while the hypothesis is actually confirmed by our theoretically derived testing strategy.     

Generalised joint regression for count data: a penalty extension for competitive settings

Statistics and Computing - We propose a versatile joint regression framework for count responses. The method is implemented in the R add-on package GJRM and allows for modelling linear and...