Robert David, Associate Professor of Strategy and Organization at McGill University

Abstract

We seek to understand how actors’ interpretations of issues evolve over time within fields, and what factors contribute to heterogeneity in these interpretations. Empirically, we examine how groups of actors in the field of civil aviation interpreted environmental issues over the period 1996-2010. Actors employed various cultural frames to interpret environmental issues as these rose and fell in prominence within the field. We develop a framework to track actors’ framing trajectories over time, in particular the extent to which these frames reveal actors’ stance towards buffering versus integrating issues into their core operations, and describe four such prototypical framing trajectories. We find that actors’ framing trajectories were influenced by their positions within the field, which in turn were influenced by public attention to the issues. We conclude with a conceptual model that links actor framing trajectories to issue settlement within organizational fields.