Roy J. Lewicki is Dean's Distinguished Teaching Professor of Management and Human Resources at the Ohio State University and lead author of the textbook Essentials of Negotiation, 2nd edition (McGraw-Hill, 2000).

Barbara Gray is professor of organizational behavior and director of the Center for Research in Conflict and Negotiation at The Pennsylvania State University.

Michael Elliott is associate professor of city planning and public policy, co-director of the Southeast Negotiation Network, and director of the Public Policy Program, Consortium on Negotiation and Conflict Resolution at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Framing of Environmental Disputes

Barbara Gray

Imagine two young brothers tumbling in the family playroom. They tussle back and forth giggling as they wrestle each other to the ground. Although they are rambunctious, they do not hurt each other. They are roughhousing—playing. Next, imagine that one of the boys cuffs his brother rather sharply on the ear and the second boy stops cold. Suddenly, they are no longer playing. The fists fly fast and furiously as both boys start to hurt each other and try to win the fight that has emerged.

Why did their interaction shift from playing to fighting? To answer that question, think about their perceptions. At first, they saw their tussle as play; then they saw it as fighting. The shift occurred because they viewed their interaction in a new light. What was considered play initially was reframed as fight when the play became too rough. Their perspective about their interaction changed, or, to use our terminology, they framed their interaction as playing and then they framed it as fighting.

So what does it mean to say they are "framing" their interaction? Framing involves shaping, focusing, and organizing the world around us. The brothers were having fun until one experienced pain in his ear. Suddenly the frame "play" didn't make sense anymore. Fun does not include pain; in reaction to the pain the first brother reframed the interaction as a "fight" and expressed the result of this reframing by slugging his sibling. Sure enough, his brother responded by framing the interaction as "fight" as well, and the fists flew.

When we use the words "shaping," "focusing," and "organizing" we are talking about framing, and when we use the words "fight" and "play" we are talking about the frames the boys created by framing. Framing is the activity and process of creating and representing frames. It is important to keep in mind, however, that frames may not be permanent. They can change through future reframing activity. For example, we can frame our favorite hockey player as a "hero" when she scores the winning goal, and as a "bum" when she misses the open net; our parents as "loving" when they pay our tuition, and as "demanding" when they tell us to get a summer job; and ourselves as "studious" when we prepare diligently for an exam, and as "clever" when we pass the exam without reading the textbook.

Environmental disputes are shaped, focused, and organized by the disputants as well as the observers. In this book we argue that the process of framing offers a powerful, if partial, explanation for why some environmental disputes resist resolution. Framing refers to the process of constructing and representing our interpretations of the world around us. We construct frames by sorting and categorizing our experience—weighing new information against our previous interpretations. Through this process we focus attention on an event or issue by "imparting meaning and significance to elements within the frame and setting them apart from what is outside the frame" (Buechler 2000, 41). Framing also involves a representational process in which we present or express how we make sense of things. Constructing and representing, however, are not necessarily separate activities. It is often necessary to represent our thoughts in words to know what we really think of a situation or experience (Weick 1979, 1995).

In addition to being an interpretive process that helps us to understand and clarify what we are experiencing, framing also enables us to locate ourselves with respect to that experience. Through framing, we place ourselves in relation to the issues or events—that is, we take a stance with respect to them (Taylor 2000). Taking a stance involves making attributions about how and why events have occurred (i.e., causality) and who is responsible (i.e., acknowledging or blaming). A frame reflects our interpretation of what is going on and how we see ourselves and others implicated in what is happening.

When we frame a conflict, we develop interpretations about what the conflict is about, why it is occurring, the motivations of the parties involved, and how the conflict should be settled. And we are likely to frame the conflict differently depending on whether we are an observer of others involved in the conflict, a supporter or an opponent of the disputants, or one of the disputants. For example, in the year following the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, technical experts from the utility and some citizens held different frames about the risks associated with cleaning up the reactor. The utility was eager to release the radioactive krypton gas remaining in the crippled reactor to reduce any threat of a further catastrophe from keeping the gas bottled up. Local citizens, on the other hand, were worried about suspected health effects from releasing the krypton into the atmosphere. Each framed the potential risk differently

We all use frames to make sense of the world around us. A frame provides a heuristic for how to categorize and organize data into meaningful chunks of information. When we frame something, we put it in perspective by relating it to other information that we already "know"

Numerous definitions of frames have been provided by researchers in cognitive psychology, microsociology, and sociolinguistics. Cognitive psychologists view frames as cognitive structures in our memory (Bartlett 1932) that help us organize and interpret new experiences (Minsky 1975). In this view, frames are retrieved from memory to guide interpretation of new experiences. The choice of which frame to adopt in a given situation depends on the cues that others in an interaction send as well as on one's own repertoire of memories (Bateson 1972, Van Dijk 1977,1987). For example, if your friend Tom says to you, "I've...