Browsing by Author "Maguire, Lynn A"

Environmental managers are continually faced with new challenges to improve stakeholder relationships, save money and reduce the organization’s environmental footprint. Many of these challenges can be efficiently addressed by implementation of an environmental management system (EMS). However, there are a number of different environmental management systems which are available. Selecting the system that is the best fit for an organization can be difficult.

Fortunately, multicriteria decision analysis is well-suited to this type of decision problem. The objective of this project was to construct a decision analysis tool to differentiate among environmental management systems based on organizations’ preferences. The project focused on three environmental management systems: ISO14001, Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS) and The Natural Step (TNS). The tool was built using the expertise of environmental management system practitioners to evaluate the systems on criteria representing financial, logistical and environmental goals. I tested the tool using the preferences of environmental managers at two chemical and two manufacturing facilities to show that the tool is useful. I improved the tool’s user-friendliness based on comments from a typical user.

The results showed that the Eco-Management and Audit Scheme system scored best on the majority of attributes, and was the preferred alternative for three out of four sample cases. Additionally, the most important attributes amongst all respondents were verification reliability and environmental stewardship. Slight similarities in the importance rating of attributes were seen between the facilities of equivalent size.

Overall, the process demonstrated that how an EMS is implemented at an organization will be based on the preferences of the organization and what they are hoping to accomplish with their system. While some organizations want to focus on saving money, others choose to focus on a reduction in emissions. The decision analysis tool I developed is flexible enough to accommodate such differences in priorities.

Finally, this research showed that none of these three systems scored perfectly on all company objectives. It is possible to identify the single system that best matches a facility’s preferences, but the best environmental management system may be a hybrid among the three.

Climate change is thought to be one of the most pressing environmental problems facing humanity. However, due in part to failures in political communication and how the issue has been historically defined in American politics, discussions of climate change remain gridlocked and polarized. In this dissertation, I explore how climate change has been historically constructed as a political issue, how conflicts between climate advocates and skeptics have been communicated, and what effects polarization has had on political communication, particularly on the communication of climate change to skeptical audiences. I use a variety of methodological tools to consider these questions, including evolutionary frame analysis, which uses textual data to show how issues are framed and constructed over time; Kullback-Leibler divergence content analysis, which allows for comparison of advocate and skeptical framing over time; and experimental framing methods to test how audiences react to and process different presentations of climate change. I identify six major portrayals of climate change from 1988 to 2012, but find that no single construction of the issue has dominated the public discourse defining the problem. In addition, the construction of climate change may be associated with changes in public political sentiment, such as greater pessimism about climate action when the electorate becomes more conservative. As the issue of climate change has become more polarized in American politics, one proposed causal pathway for the observed polarization is that advocate and skeptic framing of climate change focuses on different facets of the issue and ignores rival arguments, a practice known as “talking past.” However, I find no evidence of increased talking past in 25 years of popular newsmedia reporting on the issue, suggesting both that talking past has not driven public polarization or that polarization is occurring in venues outside of the mainstream public discourse, such as blogs. To examine how polarization affects political communication on climate change, I test the cognitive processing of a variety of messages and sources that promote action against climate change among Republican individuals. Rather than identifying frames that are powerful enough to overcome polarization, I find that Republicans exhibit telltale signs of motivated skepticism on the issue, that is, they reject framing that runs counter to their party line and political identity. This result suggests that polarization constrains political communication on polarized issues, overshadowing traditional message and source effects of framing and increasing the difficulty communicators experience in reaching skeptical audiences.