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Pitch

What cultural frames are used by workteams around energy conservation; does aligning conservation campaigns with such frames improve uptake?


Description

Summary

In addressing climate change and culture, this proposal focuses on workplace culture. These organizations have the highest potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 according the IPCC, and they also use twice as much energy as households in America. No-one to this author’s knowledge has examined how subcultures in organizations and specifically the frames they use to create meanings and decisions align (or not) with energy conservation campaigns. Without understanding these frames, campaign implementers are working in the dark. This study will remedy this gap by contributing an understanding of what frames are used in work cultures around energy conservation, and whether using these frames with energy conservation behaviors contribute to new behavioral uptake or not. Specifically, this proposal details a sequential project that will: 1) explore the frames used by workteams in successful and failed energy conservation campaigns; and 2) use a quasi field-experiment to confirm that aligning behavioral asks with workplace cultural frames in such campaigns supports successful implementation.

But what is this thing called a frame? To craft effective messaging requires knowledge of differing audiences’ desires, motives and goals.  However, too often these audiences have been segmented based on their positions on an issue rather than the frames that different cultures use to understand climate change, or the behaviors that fuel it. Frames are the larger meanings that provide the context within which an argument occurs; for instance, although two people might argue for or against having spaghetti for their meal, they are operating within the shared framework of dinner rather than lunch or breakfast plans. Focusing on positions to the exclusion of the cultural frame used to construct an argument and generate agreement or disagreement is detrimental to fully understanding different audiences, their cultures, and their potential to come together on issues that matter.

 

 


Category of the action

Changing public perceptions on climate change


What actions do you propose?

Method:

  1. Exploring frames used in successful and unsuccessful energy conservation campaigns, as well as frames used by companies which haven’t experienced an energy conservation campaign.
    1. This portion of the study will use open-ended interviews with work-team members to discuss how they conceive of everyday office activities that use energy, and the frames surrounding that use. Participants will come from companies that have participated in successful and failed energy conservation campaigns, as well as companies which haven’t undertaken such campaigns. Behavioral scripts and their associated frames will be generated; these are habitual sequences of action in different contexts. I expect to undertake interviews until no new scripts or frames emerge.

      In addition, this portion of the study will undertake a breaching experiment at several other workplace organizations. Breaching experiments are based on the notion that our social norms are difficult to articulate because they become habituated and unconscious. For example, I might not be able to articulate why I do something in an everyday fashion, like line up at a ticket counter in a single line rather than congregating at the front in a crowd. However, breaching everyday etiquette allows people to react to what is being breached and articulate it in a more conscious manner. Breaching will be done by turning off office lighting and office equipment at random times by confederates, and participant’s reactions will be recorded and follow-up interviews undertaken to detail the social norms around lighting and office equipment behavior.

      Content analysis will be undertaken on both sets of daya, which is a method that is used to understand the frames by reading the interview transcripts and identifying thematic meanings. By identifying the frames used by differing workplace cultures, I will be able to develop a tool that will allow me to examine how they’re used in real-world implementation campaigns.
       
  2. This section of the study will develop an RCA survey and administer it in a field experiment to organizations interested in implementing an energy feedback campaign. The goal will be to ascertain whether or not campaign messaging that uses workgroups’ cultural frames is more effective at encouraging behavioral uptake than campaign messaging that does not.
    1. Relational class analysis (RCA) is a method developed by Amir Goldberg that assigns people to groups based on frames that they use when focusing on an issue, rather than their agreement or disagreement on that topic. Importantly, in addition to delineating the meanings that different groups use to make meaning of the world around them, RCA also provides the ability to determine what the ‘tipping point’ of a frame is – in other words, it allows analysis of which meanings create different segments of the population under study and whether taking away a particular topic results in less factions. Using the frames from the first portion of the study, I will develop and administer an RCA survey to workgroups from 3-4 organizations to determine which frames they are using in relation to energy behaviors. Then I will randomly assign them to a synchronous or asynchronous messaging condition, where the messaging that they receive about the campaign will either contain frames that they use as a group or frames that run counter to their group.

      The campaign will run for six weeks and will be a simple energy feedback campaign, focusing on goals to reduce office behaviors that employees feel they can undertake, such as turning off lights and office equipment. Energy consumption will have been measured on a daily basis for two months prior to the intervention to establish baseline use; it will be measured during the campaign via office equipment and lighting feedback tools. Participants will be required to check the feedback displays online each day. Participants will be surveyed at three other time periods – once in the middle of the campaign, at the end of the campaign, and a month after the campaign. The survey will not take more than ten minutes, and will contain measures to examine: self-reported behavior change, behavioral intention change, coping behaviors used during the change, collective efficacy and expected outcome measures and whether each behavioral ask is a good idea or not. In addition, several other measures will be used to control for potential confounds, such as trust among the group, personal openness to change initiatives and the degree of supported sustainability at the organization.

      This rich data set will allow for standard statistical analysis as well as correlation with the RCA clustering to examine workgroup changes over the time period.


Who will take these actions?

As my PhD thesis I will undertake this research.


Where will these actions be taken?

The research will be undertaken in the northeastern USA.


How much will emissions be reduced or sequestered vs. business as usual levels?


What are other key benefits?

This study will develop a typology of cultural frames used by workers in workplace settings when undertaking behaviors that use energy and show whether alignment of campaign messaging with frames among such workgroups will improve behavioral uptake of energy conservation. These frames and the accompanying RCA survey could be used as an initial evaluation tool to assess workgroup culture and align campaign messaging, being of interest to social marketers, policy makers and corporations.


What are the proposal’s costs?

Costs include the following:

Recruitment:
-Inenctives for interviews/breaching experiments: participants' will be entered into a draw to win a $50 gift certificate from Amazon. There will be 10 such gift certificates available, for a total of $500.

-Quasi-experiment: workteams will be eligible for a draw for a catered lunch. There will be eight such lunch awards available, at $200 per team, for a total of $1600.

-Recruitment materials, such as producing and copying materials like recruitment posters and sign-up sheets ($300).

Equipment:
-lighting and office equipment feedback via in-kind Lucid dashboard at Cornell University for quasi-experiment.

-hand held digital microphone for recording interviews: voice recorder 2 GB on Amazon - $35.00

Survey
-the survey will be electronic, furnished by Qualtrics. As a Cornell student I have free access to a Qualtrics account.

Transcription:
-transcription of the interviews: assuming 40 interviews and five hours to transcribe one interview, and paying a student $10 an hour to transcribe = $2000.00

Analysis
-in-kind content and statistical analysis, provided by myself. SPSS, Atlas.ti and R (statistical and content analysis programs) provided to me by Ciser at Cornell.

Total: $4435.00
 

 


Time line

The interviews and breaching experiments will happen this fall, as will recruitment for workplaces for the field experiment. Content analysis to identify themes will occur in January and early February, 2014. RCA survey development and the field experiment will run in the spring-summer of 2014, from February-July. Data analysis will occur from September 2014-January 2015.


Related proposals


References

Brummans, B. H. J. M., Putnam, L. L., Gray, B., Hanke, R., Lewicki, R. J., & Wiethoff, C. (2008). Making sense of intractable multiparty conflict: A study of framing in four environmental disputes. Communication Monographs, 75(1), 25–51.

Center for Sustainable Systems (CFSS), University of Michigan. (2011).Commercial Buildings Factsheet. Pub. No. CSS05-05. Retrieved November 21, 2012 from http://css.snre.umich.edu/css_doc/CSS05-05.pdf

Goldberg, A. (2011). Mapping Shared Understandings Using Relational Class Analysis : The Case of the Cultural Omnivore. American Journal of Sociology.

Howard-Grenville, J. a. (2006). Inside the “Black Box”: How Organizational Culture and Subcultures Inform Interpretations and Actions on Environmental Issues. Organization & Environment, 19(1), 46–73.

Levine, M., Urge-Vorsatz, K., Blok, K., Geng, L., Harvey, D., Lang, S., Levermore, G., Mehlwana, A. M., Mirasgedis, S., et al. (2007). Residential and Commercial Buildings.

Linnenlueck, M., Russell, S., Griffiths, A. (2009). Subcultures and Sustainability Practices. Business Strategy and the Environment, 18, 432-452.

McLeod, J., Chaffee, S. (1973). Interpersonal Approaches to Communication Research. American Behavioral Scientist, 16(4), 469.

Milgram, S., Sabini, J. (1978). On maintaining Urban norms: a Field Experiment in the Subway. In A. Baum, J. Singer & S. Valinus (Eds) Advances in Environmental Psychology. New Jersey: Lawrence Earlbaum.

Russell, S., McIntosh, M. (2011). Changing Organizational Culture for Sustainability. In N. Ashkanasy, C. Wilderom and M. Peterson (Eds) The Handbook of Organizational Culture and Climate. Los Angeles: SAGE.