In search of integrative logics

Abstract

On 24 July 2010, the Democrats in the US Congress declared that US climate change legislation was 'dead on arrival'. After the House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey bill by a vote of 219 to 212 one year earlier, the task of saving the patient (the environment) by passing similar legislation fell to US senators, who instead allowed the bill to die on the operating table. Along with failing to ratify the 1997 Kyoto Protocol limiting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, this was the second major disappointment regarding the role of the US in mitigating climate change. GHGs are deemed responsible for human-induced, potentially catastrophic warming of the Earth's atmosphere, increasing global air and ocean temperatures which may result in elevated sea levels, desertification and security threats from population relocation (IPCC 4th Assessment Report, 2007: 30). While many countries have initiated steps to reduce their nations' GHGs, including China's plans to introduce a carbon trading scheme in the next five years (The China Daily, 2010), the US, as the second largest CO 2 , emitter remains idle. To understand US hesitance to enact climate policy, it is necessary to recognize the climate change debate as a transnational issue involving actors with competing institutional logics pitted against one another (Ansari et al., 2011). We know from previous work that strategists and organizations interpret the world in terms of institutional logics/frames -there is a long history of evidence on this point (e.g. Friedland and Alford, 1991;Lewicki et al., 2003;Thornton and Ocasio, 2008) -and that their responses are thus at least in part a function of prevailing logics. Therefore, we need to think about the critical issue of climate change -which is perhaps THE challenge today for organizations -in terms of how logics are shaping the debate and how those logics might be adjusted or reframed to reach agreement about action going forward. For example, many in the US maintain a logic of skepticism about climate change (Hoffman, 2011). Contrarians and advocates disagree about the level of scientific uncertainty and the costs of mitigating climate change. These competing institutional logics are advanced at local, national and transnational levels as corporations and their stakeholders battle over the necessity of mitigation. Thus, understanding the failure of the US to enact climate policy relates to the 'difficulty of solving global problems that ignore the local dimension' (Carrus et al., 2005: 238).At the local level, community and regional institutions influence institutional logics by shaping how social issues are defined and negotiated (