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Oppositional organizational identities are fraught with conflict and often evoke powerful social and cultural identities. Such identities may be a divisive force among consumers. The purpose of this paper is to understand how consumers construct frames that facilitate identification with oppositional organizational identities.

The authors use online reviews from TripAdvisor.com and Yelp.com of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, USA. The Creation Museum is an ideal research context due to its location within American public discourse regarding religion and science. Through a grounded theory approach of the reviews, the authors propose three identity frames.

The data suggest that consumers primarily construct three frames to identify with the Creation Museum: transformational experiences, interpretive bricolage and oppositional scripts. Together, these frames engender resonance and facilitate consumer identification.

This paper is one of the first to examine how oppositional organizational identities garner consumer support. Given that consumers are increasingly attentive to organizational processes and the ubiquity of information technology, which reduces the costs of information and interaction, the study provides a much more holistic perspective on oppositional organizational identity and offers a multitude of future avenues for further research.

Social countermarketing (SCM) aims at influencing existing socio-cultural norms, public policies or political decision-making. Existing empirical accounts of SCM give limited insights into their success. The authors analyze SCM strategies and their public resonance by studying the diagnostic and prognostic frames and responsibility attributions that are used in the debates.

The authors focus on two online SCM campaigns in the Netherlands that are targeted against over-feeding of chickens for consumption and the selling of low-priced meat. The authors conducted a quantitative content analysis (N = 3,902) of these debates on Twitter for a two-year period (July 2015 to June 2017).

The results show that citizens play an important role for the amplification of SCM campaigns. Diagnostic and prognostic frames about meat selling practices are among the most popular ones while the importance of mobilization messages differs per case. This can be explained by the proximity of these frames to citizens' daily life experiences.

The apparent willingness of citizens to both tweet and retweet calls for mobilization might give messages by environmental NGOs third-party endorsement. This strengthens their position and visibility in the debates, which are both of strategic value. The analysis of actor responsibility can identify reputational risks for companies in contested industries such as mass meat production.

The findings enhance professional understanding of designing campaign messages and refine SCM success in terms of resonance, since resonance indicates amplification and third-party endorsement.

Social movement scholarship points to the significance of collective identity in social movement emergence. This chapter examines the relationship between structural identities, such as race, gender, and sexuality, and the collective identity of student activist conferences in order to analyze how groups succeed or fail at engaging difference. Utilizing ethnographic participant observation at two student activist conferences – one of majority Black students and the other of majority white male students – this chapter employs an intersectional framework in analyzing the resonance of organizational collective action frames. This chapter finds that cultural resonance, frame centrality, and experiential commensurability are all important factors in engaging difference, and that the utilization of political intersectionality in framing may shape frame resonance. This framework that applies intersectionality to framing contributes to social movement analysis by recognizing how structural identities shape collective identity and group mobilization.

This article seeks to analyse the skills and knowledge that have a positive impact on the reproduction of the core frames of social actors in the mass media.

The theoretical discussion is accompanied by a cross‐cultural case study of the debate surrounding the leaked e‐mail correspondence between climate researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in 2009. First, the authors analysed the framing work of the three main actors with their respective views, namely UEA and the blogs “Real climate”, “Climate audit” and “The air vent”. Second, they conducted an analysis of the media coverage of the issue in the UK, the USA, Germany and Norway, focusing on the importance of cultural factors, psychological biases and conformity to journalistic needs.

The literature review came to the conclusion that public relations practitioners stand good chances to succeed with their framing when they are able to conceive a message in a way that: is resonant with the underlying culture; appeals to psychological biases; and conforms to journalistic needs. The authors use “framing expertise” as an umbrella term for the knowledge and the skills related to these aspects when designing and promoting frames. In the case study, these theoretical assumptions were tested. While three different frames dominated the discourse, no clear winner of the framing contest was observed. Though qualitative differences in their framing expertise were noted, the frames of all of the strategic actors were accepted in the media, perhaps due to the norms of journalistic balance.

As this study is based on a single case, more research is needed to back up the findings and elaborate on the knowledge and skills needed when framing an issue.

The article pulls together, discusses and elaborates on a body of literature that thus far has been scattered, and makes contributions towards a better understanding of what it is that public relations practitioners actually do.

We examine the emergence of an organizational form, charter schools, in Oakland, California. We link field-level logics to organizational founding identities using topic modeling. We find corporate and community founding actors create distinct and consistent identities, whereas more peripheral founders indulge in more unique identity construction. We see the settlement of the form into a stable ecosystem with multiple identity codes rather than driving toward a single organizational identity. The variety of identities that emerge do not always map onto field-level logics. This has implications for the conditions under which organizational innovation and experimentation within a new form may develop.

The news of recent mobilizations in Arab, European, and North-American countries quickly spread across the globe. Well before written reports analyzing the unfolding mobilizations, images of protests circulated widely through television channels, print newspapers, internet websites, and social media platforms. Pictures and videos of squares full of people protesting against their governments became the symbols of a new wave of contention that quickly spread from Tunisia to many other countries. Pictures and videos showing the gathering of people in Tahrir square (Egypt), Puerta del Sol (Spain), and Zuccotti Park (United States) quickly became vivid tools of “countervisuality” (Mirzoeff, 2011) that opposed the roaring grassroots political participation of hundreds of thousands people to the silent decisions taken in government and corporation buildings by small groups of politicians and managers. The presence, and relevance, of images in mobilizations of social movements is no novelty. Encounters with social movements have always been intrinsically tied to the visual sense. Activists articulate visual messages, their activities are represented in photos and video sequences, and they are ultimately rendered visible, or invisible, in the public sphere. Social movements produce and evoke images, either as a result of a planned, explicit, and strategic effort, or accidentally, in an unintended or undesired manner. At the same time, social movements are perceived by external actors and dispersed audiences via images which are produced both by themselves and others.

Using data from a multi-method study with a national reproductive justice coalition, this chapter examines the emergence of the US reproductive justice movement. I first examine how reproductive justice emerged in relation to the mainstream women's movements. Then I demonstrate how, due to the relationship between reproductive justice and social identity, the boundaries of the reproductive frame and movements are simultaneously broader and more constrained in meaning than reproductive rights. Finally, I show how (perceived) co-optation leads to tensions between movement sectors and weakens the potential for reproductive justice to reinvigorate activism around reproductive issues. I conclude with how the success of the reproductive justice movement, including around diversity and coalition building, can inform other social movements.

This article argues that troubles – including how they are identified, how responsibilities for their creation and remedy are assigned, and the actions people pursue to resolve them – are a central sociological concern that runs across a wide array of sub-fields. This article illustrates this point by examining how troubles are discussed in literatures including the sociology of law (or, more broadly, law and society), social movement studies, social problems, and organizational quality and conflict. Furthermore, this article argues that more is being lost by parceling these questions into disconnected sub-fields chosen based on the resolution process (i.e., use a court to resolve the problem, use a social movement, use policy-making) than is being intellectually gained. To make this point, common findings, questions, and quandaries that emerge from a broader examination of a sociology of troubles are discussed. The article recommends that a broader sociology of troubles be developed, bringing the welter of sub-fields studying troubles into smoother conversation, and recommends analyses that consider multiple resolution alternatives (e.g., filing a lawsuit, versus protesting, versus “lumping it”).

Frame resonance and innovative tactics can substitute for a movement’s lack of important resources to sustain protests. This chapter shows how the insurgent groups in the 2011 Tunisian uprising that lacked mass-based organizations and national leaders maintained and spread the protests using frame resonance and innovative tactics. It argues that the activists’ strategy of frame resonance drew on the collective identity of the poor people in the interior regions, mainly their collective feeling of social marginalization. Activist organizers also relied on a motivational campaign aimed at converting the feelings of injustice held by those in the interior regions into anger against the regime. The innovative tactics of the activists included locating protests inside poor people’s neighborhoods, especially in coastal regions. The engagement of poor people in the protests sustained them in two ways: by spreading and intensifying protests through individual initiatives, and by weakening the Tunisian police in sustained disruptive actions and spontaneous riots. These findings are based on the narratives of 81 activists, insurgent groups’ documents, chanted slogans, and official state documents. The fieldwork research was conducted in Tunisia during the months of April and May 2012, and June 2013.

As the framing perspective has evolved, there has been growing recognition that framing processes cannot be adequately understood apart from the broader enveloping contexts in which those processes occur. One such context recently has been conceptualized as discursive opportunities or the DOS. To date the concept has been examined most closely and carefully in relation to the media, most notably in Koopmans research on how the strategies of the German radical right have evolved partly in response to various media reactions and constraints (Koopmans, 2004) and in Ferree, Gamson, Gerhards, and Rucht's (2002) comparison of abortion discourse in the U.S. and Germany (between 1970 and 1994) via the media. Koopmans provides the most straightforward and researchable conception of discursive opportunities, defining them in terms of three selection mechanisms that affect the probability of a proffered message or framing being picked-up and diffused. They include “visibility (the extent to which a message is covered by the mass media), resonance (the extent to which others – allies, opponents, authorities, etc. – react to a message), and legitimacy (the degree to which such reactions are supportive)” (Koopmans, 2004, p. 367).