Sociology Department Colloquium: Edward Walker

Please join us for a colloquium being given by Edward Walker, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The Situation Room: Stigma Management and the Claims-Making of Contested Industry Groups

Firms and industries often face multiple challenges to their practices emerging from activist groups, negative media reports, policy threats, and/or scientific findings that challenge the safety and legitimacy of industry practices. For these reasons, industry groups must often take measures to respond to such challenges in the public sphere, and these measures often take the form of collective stigma-management efforts. In this study, we investigate data from press releases issued between 2009-2015 by the two predominant industry associations in the fracking-heavy region of the Marcellus Shale: Energy in Depth and the Marcellus Shale Coalition. We investigate a variety of influences on industry claims-making: anti-fracking protests, media reports about fracking, press releases of scientific studies that raise questions about the safety of fracking, and broader political and economic factors. We focus on how these influences affect both the volume and the valence of these pro-fracking communications, highlighting the ways that these claims reflect the severity of perceived threat to the industry’s collective reputation. We then examine the extent to which press release content and contextual factors affect their likelihood of generating downstream media impact. We highlight implications of this work for theory and research on social movements and stakeholders, the energy sector, public relations strategies, and organizational theory on stigma and reputation management more broadly.