Industry Repertoires: How Transgressive and Conventional Industry Associations Seek to Counter Contention

Abstract

While considerable attention has been devoted to the repertoires of social movements, we know considerably less about how the repertoires of industry groups evolve as those industries face movement-driven contention. This is particularly important for environmental movements, which regularly target industries seen as contributing to environmental harms and risks. Focusing on contention surrounding hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), we compare the repertoires of the two central industry associations promoting fracking in the Marcellus Shale region of the United States: one that is more transgressive and likely to counter-attack activists (Energy in Depth) and one that is more conventional and likely to tout the industry’s economic benefits (Marcellus Shale Coalition). We examine the tone and topical content of each of these industry groups’ communications between 2009 and 2019. We examine a number of specific features of industry groups’ communications: whether they use a more positive or negative tone, and the extent to which their communications address activism, government regulation, jobs/economy, and climate change. We find that the more transgressive association focuses far more directly on countering activism, both in the timing and content of communications. Both engage with government roughly evenly, and each engages with the politics of climate change in unique ways. We develop insights for our understanding of how targets strategically respond to environmental activism, and how industry groups develop a meta-level division of labor to engage multiple audiences.