Hegemonic stabilization through framing contests: Media evaluations of a prefigurative alternative organization

Abstract

The aim of this study is to examine how framing contests around prefigurative alternative organizations unfold over time and how they shape the terms through which such initiatives are evaluated in media discourse. We do so through a framing analysis of media coverage of NewB, an ethical and co-operative bank founded in Belgium in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, examining how journalists, regulators, financial experts, and incumbent actors engage in sustained struggles over the initiative’s meaning and legitimacy. We show that the framing contest unfolds through five phases that progressively reorganize the terms of evaluation. We conceptualize this process as evaluative capture, a form of hegemonic stabilization through which sustained media attention progressively subjects alternative claims to dominant capitalist and sectoral logics, thereby narrowing the range of legitimate interpretations and foreclosing the possibility of evaluating alternatives on their own terms. We identify four mechanisms through which evaluative capture operates – temporal recalibration, risk inversion, moral deflection, and retrospective closure – that repeatedly redefine expectations, reattribute risks, redirect moral critique, and retrospectively stabilize outcomes. Finally, we highlight key vulnerabilities that prefigurative alternative organizations face in framing contests.