When Worlds Collide? Hearings vs. Media in Making Meaning for Alberta’s Oil Sands

• Author / Creator

  Lefsrud, Lianne M.

• Although resources are central in many organizational theories, we tend to overlook the social processes by which these become defined, infused with value, and made usable by rules. Thus I ask: How has a once legitimate and unquestioned energy source – the Alberta oil sands – become problematized? Neither the nature of this resource nor the decision processes for development have fundamentally changed over the past 50 years. Yet, the meanings of this previously taken-for-granted resource have become so contested within and between the regulatory development hearings and public media more broadly, such that industry self-regulation and international rulings are being transformed. To unpack the processes by which stakeholders construct and contest these meanings, I draw on an extended case study of Alberta’s oil sands. I start by examining macro-level evolution of meaning in global media, then macro- to micro-level meanings between hearings and the surrounding media, and lastly on interactive macro- to micro-level contestations as discursive stakeholders agentically leverage across these arenas. During field emergence, oil (and tar as its descriptive synonym) was the uncontested resource of interest in this discursive field. Our interest in it increased exponentially, along with its value on the world market. This changed in 2008 and onwards, when water (and tar as the newly pejorative variation of ‘oil’) became a central resource in the discussion. The refocusing was catalyzed by the 1600 duck deaths on Syncrude’s tailings ponds and by increasing concerns amongst Aboriginal peoples about contamination of the Athabasca River. This shift in the discussion represents an effort to balance the technical utility of oil with the life affirming essence of water, from a broader constituency of discursive stakeholders. My cross-arena rhetorical analysis illustrates how discursive stakeholders use different rhetorical tools to position and counter-position themselves against their opponents, differently in public media versus hearings, to influence the regulatory outcomes. This demonstrates that, when faced with decades of institutional intransigence, interstices between discursive fields can reveal hypocrisies and give challengers leverage points for change.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Discursive field
  • Institutional change
  • Rhetoric

• Graduation date

  Spring 2014

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3T10N

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.