UC Berkeley

In this dissertation, I examine how American organizations have framed the issue of climate change, and how cultural and organizational processes affect which conceptions of climate change become dominant in mainstream media. First, I use a variety of automated text analysis procedures (topic modeling, multi-dimensional scaling, and cluster analysis) to describe a large, random sample of business, government, and social advocacy organizations’ press releases about climate change from 1985 to 2013 (N = 1,768). Next, I use plagiarism-detection software to track how organizations’ messages have been picked up in all articles about climate change published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today from 1985 to 2014 (total N = 34,948). These techniques allow me to describe organizations’ framing attempts and then to investigate why some succeed and diffuse into the larger discursive environment and others do not, highlighting organizational power and cultural resonance as two distinct paths through which organizations’ messages gain visibility.

The dissertation is organized around three empirical chapters. In the first empirical chapter, I describe how American organizations have framed the issue of climate change over the course of the climate change debate. Across a range of organizations with different motivations and strategies, one would expect very different framings, particularly from corporations seeking to oppose action on climate change as compared to advocacy organizations trying to affect those changes. Instead, I find that a single, “post-political” frame of climate change dominates discourse. This framing is expert-oriented and technocratic, casting consensual action among economic and political elites as the appropriate way to address the climate problem, and neglecting concerns of values and identity widely believed to be important for social movement mobilization. This suggests that both businesses and civil society organizations have responded to mounting evidence of climate change by proposing methods to address environmental degradation that reinforce rather than challenge the economic and political status quo. In addition, to the extent that earlier scholars are correct that conflict-oriented discursive strategies—such as identification of a common antagonist—are effective at rousing public concern, this suggests that climate discourse is unlikely to mobilize strong public emotion and activism.

The second empirical chapter examines how organizations’ characteristics affect their ability to influence wider discourse. I find that advocates against action to address climate change are about twice as likely to be cited in national newspapers as are advocates for climate action. In addition, business coalitions and very large businesses are more likely than other types of organizations to receive coverage, either because these firms are seen as important players in the national economy or because these organizations have more human resources to expend promoting their messages. Surprisingly, scientific and technical organizations are less likely to receive news coverage than are other organizations, suggesting that organizations with presumably greater expertise to speak to the scientific issues around climate change are afforded less media attention. My findings therefore suggest that climate discourse may contribute to the problem of stalled action to address climate change on two fronts: organizations primarily advocate for action to address climate change in ways that are unlikely to mobilize a public response, while the relatively small number of organizations that advocate against any action whatsoever receive heightened visibility in the public sphere.

Finally, in the third empirical chapter, I examine how broad-based cultural narratives and the interventions of powerful organizations have each influenced the American climate change debate. I code press releases according to whether they would be expected to (a) resonate with latent American cultural narratives, (b) appeal to audiences’ values, emotions, and identities, or (c) speak to audiences’ topical concerns, allowing me to perform a rare deductive test of whether cultural resonance influences whether organizations’ framings of climate change receive coverage in mainstream media. My results suggest that climate change messages that appeal to audiences’ values, emotions, and identities receive heightened media visibility, as do messages that appeal to audiences’ topical concerns for economic well-being during periods of economic downturn. In addition, appeals that accord with American cultural models of rational, market-based behavior receive more news coverage than those which do not. At the same time, business coalitions and very large businesses are more likely than other types of organizations to receive news coverage, consistent with the claim that the structural power of business interests leads their perspectives to receive disproportionate visibility. Together, these results suggest that the public debate around climate change is shaped by both the cultural meanings of climate messages and the power relationships of the organizations that promote them.