Few researchers have examined how organizational environments and framing processes simultaneously influence the diffusion of organizational practices. This article combines insight from major perspectives on the diffusion of organizational innovations and from social movement studies, and shows that the adoption of a program to address global climate change by U.S. municipalities is shaped by social contagion and organizational linkages, as well as by the actions of change-promoting agents. The findings emphasize the potential as well as the limitation of the strategic efforts on the part of innovation promoters to frame adoption in a way that will appeal to potential adopters.
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According to Schelling (2002), “Global climate change may become what nuclear arms control was for the past half-century. It took more than a decade to develop a concept of arms control. It is not surprising that it is taking that long to find a way to come to consensus on an approach to the greenhouse problem” (p. 9).
ICLEI is an international association of local governments and national and regional local government organizations that have made a commitment to sustainable development. The council was established in 1990, when more than 200 local governments from 43 countries convened at the United Nations inaugural conference entitled The World Congress of Local Governments for a Sustainable Future.
The CCP program does not include any binding laws. Although many municipalities that have adopted the CCP program have significantly reduced their emissions of greenhouse gases, some have not progressed beyond a “symbolic adoption” stage—in other words, they established emission-reduction targets but did not implement policies for these reductions.
The geographical distribution of the CCP adopters is concentrated in the Pacific Northwest and the Northeastern states—regions known for their progressive environmentalism. For instance, some of the early adopters are Seattle (WA), Portland (OR), Cambridge (MA), and Burlington (VT). However, cities located in other regions are also among the early adopters: Saint Paul (MN), Denver (CO), Tucson (AZ), and Santa Fe (NM).
Social contagion is “another way of saying that actors’ adoption behavior is a function of their exposure to other actors’ knowledge, attitude, or behavior concerning the innovation” (Van den Bulte and Lilien, 2001:1410).
Organizational fields are made of organizations that “constitute a recognized area of institutional life: key suppliers, resource and product consumers, regulatory agencies, and other organizations that produce similar services and products” (DiMaggio and Powell, 1991:64).
Change agencies are organizations that explicitly aim to influence other organizations’ decisions vis-à-vis the adoption of innovations. I use the term marketing efforts to denote the various activities in which change agencies engage in order to persuade potential adopter organizations to innovate. Change agencies’ marketing efforts can operate either through formal linkages (associational ties between organizations) or through informal linkages (organizational members’ personal friendship or acquaintance ties).
Snow et al. (1986) identify four types of frame-alignment processes: frame bridging, which links two or more ideologically congruent but structurally unconnected frames; frame amplification, which clarifies and invigorates an interpretive frame; frame extension, which extends the boundaries of a primary frame to encompass interests that are incidental to the primary objectives of movement organizers; and frame transformation, which introduces and nurtures new values and reframes erroneous beliefs.
A change agent as an individual who works for a change agency and attempts to “influence client’s innovation-decisions in a direction deemed desirable by a change agency” (Rogers, 2003:366). An organizational innovation champion is a “charismatic individual who throws his or her weight behind an innovation, thus overcoming indifference or resistance that the new idea may provoke in an organization” (p. 414).
Indeed, one can argue that the CCP program’s goal can be incompatible with a city’s goal of economic growth if local economic development depends on attracting heavily polluting industries to the region.
The ROAD project is the only publicly available dataset containing information about voting behavior that can be aggregated at the level of cities. Although it would have been preferable to use data from the presidential elections during the 1990s, the ROAD data set contains data only from the 1980s. It is assumed that the ratio of Democratic to Republican votes in a city varies only slightly from one decade to another and, thus, that the political orientation of a community during the late 1980s is a reasonably accurate indicator of that community’s political orientation during the 1990s. California is the only state with available data on results of the 1992 presidential elections.
For more information on the mhdiff software, see Strang (1995).
CCC is an association of local governments sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy that aims to reduce air pollution by promoting the use of alternative fuels. RA is an association of local governments sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy that aims to reduce energy consumption by promoting energy-efficient buildings. NALGEP, founded in 1993 by a group of local officials, represents city and county environmental managers responsible for environmental compliance and the development and implementation of local environmental policies.
This weakness may be partially due to the fact that the variables’ measurement is not refined enough. For instance, the political orientation of the community does not necessarily measure the political orientation of council members and mayors, while the variable for number of ENGOs does not take into account the number of members in each ENGO. Some of these variables may also be sensitive to time variation. Two alternative measurements were used to address these limitations. First, the variable for environmental orientation was narrowed to include only environmental NGOs that are members of the Climate Action Network and are involved in actions to address global climate change. Second, data from the 2000 USCB was used to code the variables for level of education and government expenditures. None of these alternative measurements produced significant differences in results.
A total of 58 interviews (79% of the cities that adopted the CCP program) were available for the analysis. The respondents were typically staff members who had experience with the CCP program and, less frequently, council members involved in a city’s decision to adopt the program. Also 19 documents about the CCP program created by ICLEI and local governments were reviewed.
The percentage of those who worry a great deal about global climate change is relatively low (35%) compared to those who worry a great deal about the pollution of rivers and lakes (72%), toxic waste contamination (69%), or air pollution (63%) (Pew Research Center, 1997). Numerous studies show that, among developed nations, U.S. citizens are among the least informed regarding the local causes of and possible solutions for global climate change. For instance, a 2001 public opinion poll found that only 15% of the U.S. citizens surveyed correctly identified burning fossil fuels as the primary cause of global warming (Brechin, 2003). Focus group studies show that most people don’t know what they can do to address the problem of global climate change; according to Immerwahr, “when people talk about solving the problem of global warming, they almost never point out specific actions which they see as possible. Instead, what the solutions they mention have in common is that they do not involve behavioral changes that are possible in the here and now” (Immerwahr, 1999:12).
The qualitative data is limited by oversampling on the dependent variable—the evidence is presented for cases where the CCP program was adopted. Unfortunately, no information was available about cities that were informed about the CCP program but failed to adopt it.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank Dong-Il Jung, Michael Macy, John Meyer, Daniel Sherman, Sarah Soule, David Strang, and Sidney Tarrow for their helpful comments. The author would also like to thank David Strang for making available the mhdiff software that he developed.
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Revised version of the paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Atlanta, Georgia, in August 2003.
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Vasi, I.B. Organizational Environments, Framing Processes, and the Diffusion of the Program to Address Global Climate Change Among Local Governments in the United States. Sociol Forum 21, 439–466 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11206-006-9023-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11206-006-9023-5