Lianne Lefsrud

Science or Science Fiction? Professionals’ Discursive Construction of Climate Change

This paper examines the framings and identity work associated with professionals’ discursive construction of climate change science, their legitimation of themselves as experts on ‘the truth’, and their attitudes towards regulatory measures. Drawing from survey responses of 1077 professional engineers and geoscientists, we reconstruct their framings of the issue and knowledge claims to position themselves within their organizational and their professional institutions. In understanding the struggle over what constitutes and legitimizes expertise, we make apparent the heterogeneity of claims, legitimation strategies, and use of emotionality and metaphor. By linking notions of the science or science fiction of climate change to the assessment of the adequacy of global and local policies and of potential organizational responses, we contribute to the understanding of ‘defensive institutional work’ by professionals within petroleum companies, related industries, government regulators, and their professional association.

MAKING OR BREAKING WASTE FACILITY SITING SUCCESSES WITH A SITING FRAMEWORK

Waste facility siting successes depend on many linked factors of facility design and impacts, site characteristics, and community beliefs and values. A facility siting framework is constructed to combine important elements and cause-effect linkages that affect the siting outcome. The framework consists of three main components: (1) core elements of facility design, effects, and community beliefs, attitude and response; (2) contributing factors of site and community characteristics, community beliefs and values that affect the interpretation of the facility and its effects; and (3) siting management interventions to manage the process and facility impacts. The framework is applied in an unsuccessful and a successful siting case to determine the key elements that contribute to siting outcome: (1) thorough need justification for the facility from the proponent’s and the community’s perspective; (2) careful facility design and prediction of the impacts and to select impact management compensation measures; (3) screening and selection of communities where the beliefs and values are compatible with the type of facility and its effects, (4) cooperatively selected impact reduction (i.e., prevention, control, and mitigation) measures followed by compensation and incentives; and (5) intensive process management to balance the community characteristics and values with the proponent’s efforts to plan, design, assess and manage impacts, and ultimately, gain approval of the facility. The siting framework provides a comprehensive and robust structure of key factors that contribute to siting outcome and, therefore, provides the tool to identify, evaluate, and design siting interventions to enhance the chances of successful siting outcome.

Extrapolating human judgments from skip-gram vector representations of word meaning

There is a growing body of research in psychology that attempts to extrapolate human lexical judgments from computational models of semantics. This research can be used to help develop comprehensive norm sets for experimental research, it has applications to large-scale statistical modelling of lexical access and has broad value within natural language processing and sentiment analysis. However, the value of extrapolated human judgments has recently been questioned within psychological research. Of primary concern is the fact that extrapolated judgments may not share the same pattern of statistical relationship with lexical and semantic variables as do actual human judgments; often the error component in extrapolated judgments is not psychologically inert, making such judgments problematic to use for psychological research. We present a new methodology for extrapolating human judgments that partially addresses prior concerns of validity. We use this methodology to extrapolate human judgments of valence, arousal, dominance, and concreteness for 78,286 words. We also provide resources for users to extrapolate these human judgments for three million English words and short phrases. Applications for large sets of extrapolated human judgments are demonstrated and discussed.

Developing host community siting packages for waste facilities

Abstract Many types of benefits are conceivable as measures to offset waste facility impacts in a host community. Some may be ineffective or even detrimental to facility acceptance. It is in the best interest of the host community as well as the facility proponent to select and negotiate the most effective measures for a siting package. Properly sequenced, effective measures reduce time and effort required to negotiate agreements, and they may reduce the value of required siting measures. This article derives key principles and elements of siting packages: (1) need identification, (2) technical and site optimality, (3) waste stream control, (4) impact reduction management, (5) benefits, compensation, incentives, and (6) process management are shown to be important elements for siting waste facilities. An analysis of reported siting cases, however, shows that need justification, technology and site choice, and waste stream controls are infrequently used, whereas compensation benefits are often used in conjunction with process management and impact reduction. The article concludes that creative use of need identification, technology selection, and waste stream control may improve siting agreement success, shorten the negotiation process, and result in less costly agreements.

Dirty Oil or Ethical Oil? Visual Rhetoric in Legitimation Struggles

Abstract This study illuminates how organizational actors use images in their struggle to define a contested industry. By leveraging social semiotics and visual rhetoric, we examine how multimodal texts (combining words and images) are used to label and reframe an industry using technical, environmental, human-rights, and preservation-of-life criteria. Building on theories of legitimation, we find that for this industry, contesting attempts at legitimacy work are escalated along a moral hierarchy. We offer an approach for examining how actors draw from broader meaning systems, use visual rhetoric in multimodal texts, and employ dual processes of legitimation and de-legitimation.

Being Entrepreneurial in Your Storytelling: An Institutional Tale

Stories help us make sense of the world around us and our role in it, including defining ‘success’. Stories reflect society and culture at large, but are also very context-specific; they involve particular individuals and organizations. Thus, stories are a powerful mechanism linking the society and the organization. We offer an institutional view of storytelling’s role in small businesses and entrepreneurial endeavors. In academic vernacular, from our institutional viewpoint, we examine the types of organizational stories told, their sources and processes of creation, along with their direct and indirect effects. In practical terms: what stories are told, how, why, and with what effect? To do so, we rely primarily on research and examples from organization theory, strategy and entrepreneurship, focusing on new and small ventures where possible. In our concluding discussion, we suggest potential directions for researchers and possible storytelling improvements for small business owners and entrepreneurs.

Climate Change in the Era of the Anthropocene - An Institutional Analysis

Recently, many geoscientists have re-conceptualized and re-labelled our current Holocene Era as “the Anthropocene,” a less stable era with biophysical characteristics and processes strongly influenced by human activity. Yet much of the contemporary research done in organizations and the natural environmental (OandNE) theory is around climate change, which is but one of nine inter-connected “planetary boundaries” that mark this new geological epoch. With the goal of aligning institutional theory to address the deeper cultural and ideological issues of the Anthropocene, we examine this disjuncture between climate change and Anthropocene research and offer suggestions for realignment. Of particular interest to this paper is the exploration of (1) field level constituencies that have engaged, not only on climate change, but also on the other domains of the Anthropocene, and (2) the forms of discourse, meaning and framing that take place within each logic community. Empirically, we draw on systematically collected discourse data and consider specific institutional case examples of the ways in which the Anthropocene, in part or in whole, has, is or is not being engaged by various constituencies.