How history shapes energy framing across borders

Every organisation and individual employs what scholars term ‘frames’, or the strategy that enables firms or people to promote specific interpretations of events and thus focus issues in a way that best suits their interests. In the political context, this is often unflatteringly referred to as spin, yet the practice of interpreting a given set of facts in a certain way is an engrained part of discourse public and private.

Academics have long studied how framing has been used successfully by actors to enable controversial ideas to gain acceptance and for social movements to gain momentum – for example, the prolife and prochoice or same-sex marriage movements, and this often results from people selecting frames that are already available, owing to a country’s history and the media portrayal of certain political or cultural conditions. Most of this research has focused on such historical influence on field-level frames within a single country.

A rare comparative view of how frames are shaped 

Moving this understanding ahead, research co-authored by Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari, Professor of Strategy and Innovation at Cambridge Judge Business School, focuses on the debate over shale gas in France and Germany over recent decades to provide a rare comparative view of how historical context shapes such frames. In so doing, the research shows how these contrasting frames were impacted by unique historical contexts that reflect those countries’ very different energy production, and provides a framework for future scholars to conduct research across borders in a multilingual context. 

“Interestingly, although we know that past events affect the present in a rather general sense, we have a limited understanding of how historical context shapes the construction of field-level frames,” says the research by Shaz and his academic colleagues based in France, the Netherlands and the US. “One potential reason for this, we suggest, is that most studies investigate the construction of field-level frames within a single historical context rather than comparing them across contexts.” 

How framing steers action while providing a window to the future 

Adds Shaz, whose research has often focused on different aspects of framing: 

“Framing matters because it shapes what societies see, what they fight over, and what they can agree upon. Framing is not mere spin, it’s power. What is at stake is not just language or words, but the opening of new ways of thinking – reshaping the boundaries of debate, the legitimacy of alternatives and the futures that become imaginable. 

“If cannabis can shift from criminal vice to wellness industry, what else might reframing render not just possible, but inevitable? Who controls the frame controls more than the narrative – they steer the trajectory of collective action and societal change. Understanding framing is not an academic exercise but a way of seeing how our future itself is being contested and negotiated.” 

Beyond fracking: framing research on collaboration and organisational 

Other framing research by Shaz includes a study on how framing can help maintain collaboration between the private, public and non-profit sectors in climate change, showing that unanimous agreement is not needed on every mega-frame on contentious issues and this can allow sufficient common ground to emerge. “This happened not because facts alone changed, but because actors reframed the atmosphere from an inexhaustible dump into a vulnerable shared resource,” says Shaz. 

Another study proposes a multiplexed framing approach that shows how layered framing positions can often better respond to digital disruption, by treating such disruption as neither pure threat nor unalloyed opportunity. And a study of conflict minerals suggests how companies can be framed into accepting responsibility for societal problems, such as a humanitarian crisis. 

Research co-authored by Shaz and Madeleine Rauch, Associate Professor of Strategy and International Business at Cambridge Judge, used a framing lens to examine organisational repositioning during an initiative to study rare disease, and how core purpose can be reframed as actors “transcend their immediate self-interests” to serve collective goals. Frames can thus redirect purpose itself.

Shale gas debate in France and Germany offers unique research insight 

Shale gas, which is a natural gas trapped within shale rock, can be tapped through horizontal drilling or hydraulic fracturing (fracking), by injecting a mixture of water, sand and chemical additives into the bedrock. Environmentalists have long been concerned about air pollution, groundwater contamination and methane emissions from fracking, and there are also concerns about seismic activity which led to a ban on fracking in the UK enacted in 2019. The robust debate over shale fracking in France and Germany, played out in the news media and in parliaments, provided rich detail for the research by Shaz and his colleagues in the journal Organization Studies. 

Overcoming key challenges to help future scholars

The research by Shaz and his colleagues will help other researchers by addressing 2 key challenges in framing scholarship, overcoming language barriers while handling huge volumes of data. 

“In doing so, our work also illustrates how to leverage the abundance of textual data in different languages, further enhancing our ability to systematically tackle comparative framing research questions,” the authors conclude. “Our findings illustrate how STM enables researchers to extract topics from multilingual texts and aggregate them into broader field-level frames, providing a roadmap for scholars interested in systematic comparisons across multiple contexts.”