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This paper argues that the neoliberal consensus about education finance has broken down due to growing economic inequality. First, I use a comparative historical analysis of political alliances to examine patterns of world trade and nations' policies for economic and educational development since World War II. The United States emphasized STEM-collegiate preparation for all students, while most countries continued the dual emphasis on technical-tertiary and higher education. Educational policy in the US and Pacific region also shifted towards a reliance on markets and student loans resulting in worsening economic inequality in access. Nations with dual technical and academic pathways in secondary and postsecondary education systems expand college enrollment rates more rapidly than the US. They also experience class conflict between the working–middle class and the new technological elite. Next, I examine how education policy shifted from national planning aligned with public funding to market-based incentives for institutional development, further exposing gaps in opportunity within nations. Finally, recognizing the variations in systemic causes of inequality, I argue that governments, education agencies, and civic activists can best promote equity by organizing to address barriers to opportunity for groups left behind in the wake of withering neoliberal education policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose The USA is witnessing a conflict between LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) consumers/supporters and Christian fundamentalist service providers/opponents regarding whether service can be denied based on religious values. The purpose of this paper is to make a timely investigation into this conflict between marketplace inclusion (for LGBTQ consumers) and freedom of religion (for religious service providers).Design/methodology/approach The intersection of marketplace inclusion for LGBTQ consumers and religious freedom for service providers is examined by identifying appropriate strategies that address this conflict and reviewing how differing religious perspectives influence perceptions of LGBTQ consumer rights, all building off the social identity threat literature.Findings LGBTQ and religious identities often conflict to influence consumer behavior and service provider interactions. Such conflict is heightened when there is a lack of substitutes (i.e. only one service provider in an area for a specific service). Common LGBTQ consumer responses include changing service providers, providing justification for the provision of services and pursing legal recourse. Suggested strategies to address this conflict include highlighting common social identities and using two-sided messages for service providers, using in-group interventions for social groups and using government interventions for public policy.Originality/value Research has yet to examine the conflict between marketplace inclusion and religious freedom, particularly for the inclusion of LGBTQ consumers. Thus, this paper provides a novel conceptual model detailing these relationships to stimulate discussion among consumers, service providers, social groups and public policy in addition to serving as a foundation for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on legal documents, letters, and memoirs, this article describes the lives of private secretaries who often served as personal companions and the social context in which they worked, specifically focusing on the women who Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont, a New York society matron and woman's rights advocate, employed in that capacity from 1916 to 1933. It examines the nature of their employment, the emotional and social tensions that plagued their efforts to situate themselves into the world of wealth and privilege, and the way they negotiated those tensions. It argues that the work of women such as these was critical on both a practical and emotional level to the ability of society matrons to carry out their public lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ratification of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 ignited an era of fraught social tension in the United States. With strides in photographic technology occurring alongside ever-increasing restrictions on immigration laws, Chinese immigrants found themselves subjugated under new policies of enforced portraiture. At the time, they were the only immigrant group in the United States required to maintain identifying documents with headshots for verification. In this paper, I present an analysis of the power dynamics behind such photographs using an autoethnographic approach. I argue that Chinese immigrants purposely modified their portraits to reflect American measures of respectability; by doing so, they successfully challenged the authenticity of their enforced documentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes that as the nation move toward the 2020 election, civil harmony might be possible with an ideological shift. Using the words of writer Sylvia Wynter in her work, " 1492: New World View" who suggest that although this country was structured with domination and subjugation from its inception, this nation could be reimagined to embrace diverse people co‐existing. Understanding too that reconciliation must be defined by those who are marginalized, the author using an Afro‐futuristic ideology for a 2020 New World Order suggest that the Black Lives Matter movement could carry the torch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a political economy interpretation of the 'parliamentary coup' that took place in Paraguay in June 2012. It situates this analysis in the wider historical context of the protracted transition to democracy between 1989 and 2008, the rural class structure of the country, the changing character of contemporary agro-extractive capitalism, and the long-standing class struggle for redistributive land reform. By examining the Paraguayan agrarian reform impasse under the short-lived government of Fernando Lugo (2008-2012) through an 'interactive state/society' framework, this paper attempts to locate the sources of current social and political conflict in the country, and the demands of rival social groups. In doing so, the paper argues that the rise and fall of Lugo occurred in the context of structural legacies from the Stroessner era (1954-1989) that have remained largely unchanged and that coexist today with an expanding agro-extractivist development model. They lead to the conceptualization of the continued 'predatory' or 'oligarchic' state in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to examine the effect of religious heterogeneity on various important metro-area variables such as total expenditure, taxes, property taxes, debt, and employment as well as spending on the specific services of education, roads, police, health, and welfare. Two indices are used to measure religious heterogeneity, a fractionalization index and a polarization index. Polarization, designed to be a measure of social conflict, generally led to less spending and taxes, while fractionalization, the probability that two randomly chosen individuals belong to different religious groups, generally led to more spending and taxes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address the ideological narratives which came to comprise a new welfare consensus in the USA and subsequently a welfare state which was more fiscally austere, demeaning, and coercive. It also explores the role of the political and financial restructuring which facilitated the implementation of retrogressive reforms. Design/methodology/approach – Macro-level historical forces are investigated through various texts such as policy statements, journal articles, press releases, political addresses, congressional transcripts and testimony, archived papers, newspaper articles, and occasional sound bites and popular culture references pertaining to welfare and which have come to construct the common understanding of it. Findings – The formation of this consensus was due in part to three factors: first, the growth of and increased influence of an elite policy planning network; second, welfare program administration and financing had been decentralized which allowed greater autonomy of state and local governments to implement their own retrogressive reforms; and third, there emerged an overarching discourse and paradigm for structuring policy and explaining the causes of poverty which emphasized individual behavior. Originality/value – This paper focusses on the materialization of the contemporary welfare consensus during the 1980s and 1990s in terms of its ideological and political history and on its persistence which has affected the ensuing policy culture and which continues to constrain anti-poverty policy discourse as well as what can be accomplished legislatively. The paper is of value for for readers, fields, courses with work that encompasses an examination of political and social theory, ideology, social policy, power/hegemony, poverty, inequality, families, gender, race, and meaning making institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The merits of two competing views of newspaper bias are evaluated using the New York Times' coverage of racial controversies in New York City between 1960 and July 1964. The idea that the news is biased receives only limited support. Minority actors were not prohibited successfully from presenting their case to the public, were seen as initiating a variety of actions and received similar placement in the paper for their activities as more powerful political adversaries received. The conditions under which information derived from newspaper stories can be treated as a reliable and valid record of conflicts are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative research study investigates students' perspectives on the mandatory conversion to online classes due to COVID-19. In particular, this study explores (1) students' struggles with conversion of class to online, (2) students' likes of converted online class, (3) students' dislikes of converted online class, 4) students' happiness toward converted online classes, and (5) students' recommendations on ways to improve online classes. The study was conducted at three universities in the southeastern region of the United States. The major findings of the study are (1) almost 80 percent of students reported struggles when class was converted to online, (2) 88 percent of students reported dislikes about class being converted to online, and (3) 86 percent of students were happier when class met on campus. The top three struggles for students in converted to online classes were learning course materials, time management, and adjusting to changes in the course. The top three dislikes from students in converted to online classes were lack of interaction with professor and classmates, not being able to ask questions, and the course material was harder to learn online. Students did report some likes about class being converted to online such as more convenient, more flexible, responsive instructors, more time, and savings on gas and transportation costs. Overall, the research study found both positive and negative reactions from students when their classes were converted to online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally when Americans went to work they expected that they would earn a reasonable wage, work in a safe environment, put in a 40 h week, collect paid vacation days, earn sick leave, have the right to organize and receive health and retirement benefits. Increasingly, however, fewer and fewer workers receive these rights and today only a minority of people in the United States work under these conditions. The decline in real wages, benefits, rights and safety experienced by twenty-first century American workers has correlated with a decline in organized labor. Corporations and the right have assailed unions to erode worker's rights and 'increase competitiveness' in a globalized, neo-liberal, capitalist, world. The attacks on unions spring from a monstrous lie, that politicians and corporations gave labor these benefits and thus workers no longer need unions. On the battlefield of public policy, these assaults on organized labor work in a fundamentally ideological way that calls the continued existence of unions into question. In this paper, I will discuss how archaeological studies of labor's struggle can reveal that contrary to the monstrous lie, workers and their families won worker's rights with blood and that solidarity and organization remain essential to maintain these rights. The paper begins with the present state of labor's struggle and looks to the past to consider its preconditions. Archaeologists have studied strikes, the lived experience of working class life and class war to study history backwards and these studies contribute to the labor's struggle for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mainstream economists explain the Federal Reserve's behavior as (usually failed) attempts to stabilize the economy on a non-inflationary growth path. In contrast, this paper explains it in terms of class and intra-class conflicts, with the class conflict taking the form of a populist movement prior to the New Deal then a movement toward social democracy, while the intra-class conflict at issue here is between the large regional banks and the large New York banks. The paper shows that when these two groups of banks are united, they constitute an unassailable force in the class conflict. However, when the large regional banks are at loggerheads with the large New York banks over the proper role of bank clearinghouses during the populist period and the proper role of the eurodollar market during the social democratic period, then there is an opening for progressive social reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Ethnic-racial identity (ERI) development refers to how individuals' experiences, beliefs, and attitudes influence understanding of ethnic-racial group membership. Messages about race, from multiple ecosystems, influence identity development and how individuals come to form their ERI. There has been a shift in ERI research to focus on Multiracial populations, however, most of the research focus is on Black/white biracial and general, non-specified Multiracial populations. The ERI development process and experience for persons of other Multiracial backgrounds (e.g., AfroLatinx or AsianBlack) is not as extensively studied. This systematic literature review aims to elucidate the existing conceptualization of Multiracial ERI development for non-Black/white biracial and general Multiracial populations in the United States. Methods: A comprehensive search strategy was employed across multiple academic databases to identify relevant studies based on explicit inclusion criteria. The initial search resulted in 1,846 articles, but when only Black/white biracial and non-specified general Multiracial studies were eliminated from this review, only 18 articles met the criteria for inclusion. Results: Common themes emerged from the reviewed literature, including the importance of spaces, conflicting social messages directed at Multiracial individuals, and coping responses used by Multiracial individuals when faced with challenges by family members and peers regarding their multiracial identity. Discussion: The findings underscore the need for a more nuanced exploration of ERI development among diverse Multiracial populations. Understanding the unique strengths, experiences, and challenges of different Multiracial populations beyond the Black-white biracial paradigm is essential for understanding ERI development across and between different Multiracial populations in today's world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Renewable energy development is expanding throughout the United States. With the rapid increase in wind and other renewable energy production, the question of where such development is taking place becomes increasingly important. While many investigations of renewable energy structures' physical ecological impacts have been undertaken, the aesthetic and social impacts of such landscape alteration have received little attention. Moreover, research on how this type of landscape alteration affects the individuals and communities for whom development is visible has focused on areas where development has already occurred. Research has shown that communities located or invested in these areas have largely responded negatively to the aesthetic qualities and presence of visible renewable energy structures. While studying existing structures was a logical starting point for this research, investigating attitudes towards renewable energy structures before development takes place would allow visual preferences to be understood and discussed before construction. Conflicts surrounding the placement of renewable energy development have not been thoroughly researched. The roots of existing and potential conflicts need to be examined and understood. For the purpose of future development, it is important to understand reactions to renewable energy structures as the placement of future wind farms, solar panels, solar collectors and other renewable energy structures is decided. Landscape alteration due to renewable energy development needs to become a forefront agenda item for the social sciences. The topic needs to be investigated before development takes place and, most importantly, needs to add to local, regional and national conversations about where and how development should be adopted. This paper will present an affective starting point for this important social science agenda item. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ownership and control of private land is a core social value in the United States. Public planning can be seen as conflicting with this value. The long-standing tension between private property rights and public planning was heightened in the 1990s with the emergence of the so-called private property rights movement. This movement seeks to limit governmental authority over privately owned land through a multi-level strategy of legal, policy, political, and public relations actions. This paper explores the historical basis for this conflict, the legal framework within which it functions, and contemporary policy battles. The paper concludes that there may be no final outcome to this debate. Property rights activists are impassioned and believe their view of history and law is correct. I argue that it may be best to see debate about land use and property rights as one of the central vehicles for a continual reframing of core values in the American experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a discursive history of neo-Malthusianism in the United States, focusing primarily on the mid- 20th century. In the process, I critically examine texts invoking Malthusian arguments in relation to the politics of sex and birth control, class and eugenics, and race and geopolitics, focusing on how they rendered human population growth intelligible in particularly reductive and naturalistic ways. The purpose is to show how this history impinges upon the construction of population-resource theory after WWII, focusing specifically on William Vogt's Road to survival and Fairfield Osborn's Our plundered planet. I argue that the production and circulation of generalized models of population-induced conflict in the post-war United States was an important part of the nationalization and government harnessing of science in the name of national security, and relevant to post-war developmentalism and early Cold War containment doctrine. This helps us understand how neo-Malthusian discourse has been deployed as a form of bio-political governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservative Evangelicals and Neopagans in the United States have long engaged each other in public struggles over religious authority and power. This paper argues that these struggles are defined by their competing, and often fluid, interpretations of legal and constitutional norms concerning religious freedom. The result of these processes is a ‘polymorphous discourse’ whereby each religious community seeks to establish command over this range of ideas and issues in order to curtail or delegitimise the activities of the other. This ‘strategy of alterity’ shapes the way these communities understand each other, how they narrate American religious history, and how they experience political order. By balancing theoretical inquiry with case studies of local instances of Neopagan/Evangelical conflict, this paper seeks to contribute to enlarged understandings of contemporary religio-political conflict in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Offers a look at the 1776 revolution in Virginia during the colonization of Great Britain. Categories of the revolution's social conflict; Effects of the 1775 Third Virginia Convention on the state's international trade; Ideological consequences of the Loudoun County uprising.

The article analyzes the effects of ethnic conflict, fluctuations in the economy, and organizational density on the rates of founding and failure of white immigrant and African-American newspaper organizations in a system of U.S. cities, and in New York and Chicago, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Contemporary research on collective action claims that organizations play a central role in facilitating many kinds of collective actions. The authors reverse the causal link and ask whether ethnic conflict affects the life chances of social movement organizations. Results indicated that hostility and violence encouraged white immigrants to found ethnic newspapers, whereas racial attacks significantly deterred the founding of African-American newspapers. Existing immigrant newspapers thrived under attack, whereas African-American newspapers did not. Thus, the results suggest that the consequences of repressive attacks on ethnic and racial communities depend on the levels of collective violence in addition to the resources controlled by the victimized group.

This paper reports findings from an ongoing ethnographic investigation into patterns of conflict and social control involving a number of immigrants in northern New Jersey. It is an effort to advance the understanding of more general issues like the relationship between social control and culture and the effect of that relationship on communities. The paper reports findings from an ethnographic investigation into how immigrants to the contemporary United States manage grievances against people culturally different from themselves, including individuals from the majority population, other immigrants and members of American-born minority groups. Two principal patterns emerge, first that a high degree of harmony can and does exist between immigrants and other people, but that it is a harmony based largely on mutual avoidance and self-segregation rather than intercultural solidarity and support, and second, that immigrants react differently to offenders from the majority population than to those who, like themselves, come from culturally unconventional backgrounds. The reasons for these patterns are explored, and implications for the moral order of diverse communities are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Obergefell v. Hodges has changed the legal status of same-sex marriage in the United States. In some other countries, the legal debate still continues. In both, legal decisions did not reduce the deep controversies that exist between groups in society regarding the general character of marriage and the status of same-sex marriage in particular. The paper discusses the international side effects of the Obergefell decision, and asks whether these side effects necessarily include social conflict, or are there ways to promote societal agreement on this matter. By examining the Israeli situation as a test case, the paper argues that while in the legal realm Obergefell will strengthen the demand for recognition (and possibly even be decisive in the legal debate), in the social and cultural fields, gaps will continue to characterize the discourse on this matter. Therefore, the paper proposes a different socio-legal model, which is relevant to any divided society. Based on H. L. A. Hart's classic positivistic legal theory, the paper argues that scholarship needs to change the way it (often) understands the law and its social objects. Instead of substantive expectations from the law (which lead to a contest over the rights and duties that are included in it), the law must be treated as an expression of social practices. In this respect, a pluralist approach to law is possible. Despite deep controversies over right and wrong, good and bad, society through its legal system should enable different practices within shared social standards. In regards to same-sex relationships, the paper thus proposes that both contesting sides of the society will acknowledge each side's practical right to participate in defining the marital abode, possibly including marriage, as well. This acknowledgement, however, will not derive from a substantive acceptance of the other's values. The law then will become a tool of tolerance, a means for reconciliation between different worldviews, without any of them compromising on its own substantive understanding of family, partnership, and marriage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper discusses the outcome of a survey of US planners working in local governments with a population of over 25,000. The survey asked in which of 72 action areas ostensibly linked to sustainability had their government enacted policy, of these which did they explicitly link to sustainability and if they associated implementation with political conflict. We also considered the geographical variation of policies. We wished to find out if policy-makers more frequently associate sustainability with some policies over others. We hypothesized that between regions there would be significant variation in the number of policies pursued and in which were linked to sustainability, and that political conflict may explain this geographical variation. However, our findings were more limited: we found that planners are more likely to explicitly link policies pertaining to environmental goals with sustainability, and that there is geographical variation in what policies local governments pursue, although in only a few cases we found variations of statistical significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper analyzes the emergence of Rumor Control Centers (RCCs) across the US during the late-1960s. The Centers, which were operated by municipal government agencies, were formed in response to the racialized violence that flared up in many cities between 1963 and 1967. State officials encouraged citizens to call their local center if they heard a “rumor” that suggested social tensions might be increasing in their neighborhood. Preemptive measures could then be taken to prevent these tensions from escalating into a riot. The paper outlines how the same anticipatory logics that underpinned Cold War civil defense were flexibly redeployed in response to the radicalizing of the civil rights movement within the US. It also shows how security infrastructures are sometimes fragile and may be reworked or rolled back due to political pressure or more mundane reasons such as failing to hold the attention of citizens and political elites. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The saga over exempt wells in the western United States and Canada epitomizes a new type of water conflict - a spaghetti-western water war. The political melodrama stars local governments to serve as sheriff of water-supply planning duties. Exempt wells number in the millions, and herding the growing numbers is testing the mettle of the states and provinces responsible for the management, allocation, and protection of natural resources. The separation of laws governing ground water and surface water, coupled with changes in geography and geology within a jurisdiction, compound the administrative riddle and give rise to a broad spectrum of conflicts, from differing interpretations of hydrogeologic data, economic impacts associated with increasing the herd, to differing identities associated with the use of ground water from the exempt wells. Despite the political melodrama of exempt wells, there is room and willingness for other trails and paths to keep the herd intact. This paper describes the different breeds of conflicts associated with exempt wells and gives examples of how the mysterious stranger of collaborative decision making processes and water governance systems can ride into town and lead to successful water management and conflict resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces arguments from Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic¹ to suggest that the Civil War arose ultimately because of class-conflict between on the one hand, Southern slaves and their masters and, on the other, Northern workers and their employers. It does not, however, suggest that either in the North or the South these conflicts were on the point of erupting into revolution. On the contrary, they were relatively easily containable. However, harmony within each section (North and South) could be secured only at the cost of intersectional conflict, conflict which would finally erupt into civil war. The Civil War was a 'bourgeois revolution' not only because it destroyed slavery, an essentially precapitalist system of production, in the United States but also because it resulted in the enthronement of Northern values, with the normalisation of wage-labour at their core. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that identity theory can be a useful analytical tool for the scholar of relational work (Locher and Watts, Journal of Politeness Research 1: 9–13, 2005). By focusing on current news interviews broadcast in the USA, it shows how impoliteness is inextricably linked to the (co)construction of the identity of the hosts, the guests and the audience of an emergent “new” news genre; news as confrontation (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, The “new” news in America: emergence of a genre, 2007, International Review of Pragmatics, forthcoming). Impoliteness is defined as a negative identity practice (Bucholtz, Language in Society, 28: 203–223, 1999) used by the hosts to position themselves within their own community of practice. Applying Anton and Peterson's (Communication Studies, 54: 103–419, 2003) model of subject positions, an alternative definition is proposed that posits that impoliteness – and confrontation – may ensue when there is a mismatch between self asserted subject positions, i. e., the positions we temporarily choose to assume, and other asserted subject positions, i. e., the positions that others impose on us. By challenging our self asserted subject positions, the view of the world that comes along with them is questioned as well. Impoliteness is also used to forge the collective identity of one of the factions, here identified with the target audience of shows included in the study, currently waging the “Culture Wars”. This metaphor has long been used to claim that political conflict within the USA is due to a conflict between “traditional” and “progressive” values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares predictors of in-school and out-of-school delinquency and is based on data collected from 2,011 subjects at two elementary, one middle, and one high school in a rural school district. Predictors were derived from a variety of theoretical perspectives including social organization and social control; interactionist theory; differential association and social learning; strain, culture conflict, and critical theory. In addition, several demographic variables were included in the analysis. Regression results revealed that negative peer influence, victimization experience, attachment to school, gender, general strain, alienation, and the student's self-reported response to a weapon at school were significant predictors of delinquency both in and out of school. Moreover, the relative contribution of each predictor in explaining delinquency was similar in the in-school and outside-school models. The paper concludes with a discussion of the policy implications of these findings for the schools studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large body of historical evidence shows that welfare states originate in fear—class fear, and this is no less true of the United States than Western Europe. Drawing on the history of the American labor movement, populism, and progressivism, this paper questions the theory of American “exceptionalism” as well as Theda Skocpol's argument that the autonomy of capitalist states relegates Marxist theories of the state to secondary importance. The expansion and contraction of welfare states are best understood in terms of class conflict, which moves Marxism from the sidelines to the center of efforts to explain capitalist states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why are some natural resource-based political conflicts so controversial, acrimonious and intractable? What factors drive these conflicts? And what turns the common political conflict into the high-level, symbolic, and sustained political conflict? This paper conceptualizes the `drivers' of natural resource-based political conflict in the, United States. It examines the dominant themes, patterns and underlying logic of these conflicts. The very nature and context of these cases some- times promise intractability, but they are also often `wicked by design' in that political actors, institutions and policy processes often compound them. The following drivers of conflict are discussed: scarcity, the policy surrogate, the sacred and spiritual and importance of place, policy design (historical and budgetary), policy frames, scientific disagreement and uncertainty, electoral politics and the use of wedge issues, political and interest group strategy, media framing, adversarial governance, Constitutional, statutory and administrative language, and distrust. The paper finishes by placing natural resource-based conflict in political perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers elaborations on current knowledge about social-movement framing processes and cognitive liberation, especially regarding technical controversies and not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) protest. The social-constructionist lens of the framing perspective also allows refinements in conventional explanations of NIMBY conflicts. Attention is given to the dynamics of emergence, continuity, and change in framing strategies over time in controversy regarding the U.S. Army's chemical-weapons disposal program. I focus specifically on dynamics involved in the development of cognitive liberation, particularly the framing difficulties that occur in the context of cognitive ambiguities produced by an "information haze." These ambiguities create problems for developing and linking the diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational elements of collective-action frames. I also attend to frame transformation, explaining how transformation may be both animated and constrained by a movement's opponent. I conclude that NIMBY is only one possible framing and can be transformed as the context of the dispute shifts. Moreover, framing activities in technical disputes may be particularly difficult due to the role of scientific rhetoric and experts in interpreting risks and shaping understandings of the situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]