From Policy “Frames” to “Framing”

Framing as sense-making work

In policy-making, framing is a process in and through which policy-relevant actors intersubjectively construct the meanings of the policy-relevant situations with which they are involved, whether directly or as onlookers and stakeholders. When facing such situations, especially when what “worries” (Rein & Schön, 1977) or confronts them is a matter of some concern and appears uncertain or ambiguous, actors typically ask, explicitly or implicitly, the question that Goffman (1974, p. 8) posed, whose answer “framing” explicates: “What is it that’s going on here?” (cf. Jay White’s manager, as told by Ralph Hummel, 1991, p. 36). As Schön (1983) put it, “In order to convert a problematic situation into a problem,” actors must “do a certain kind of work”: They must “make sense of an uncertain situation that initially makes no sense” (p. 40). Imagine, to take a typical example from a common street-level bureaucracy, two experienced patrol officers who arrive at the scene of a domestic dispute. Although they enter the situation with prior knowledge and experience of previous disputes, they have to assess what is going on in this instance, often as it is unfolding. This is analogous (with no irony intended) to Bateson’s starting point: Is this play or fight?

The kinds of materials that policy-relevant actors might be confronted with—from more “raw” sense data such as sounds, images, or smells to that more “processed,” such as pictures, texts, or rumors—are often difficult to combine into a neat, coherent picture. Drawing on some prior cognition of the situation, as Schön (1979/1993) argued with respect to metaphors, which derives from previous experiences, expectations, and/or emotions, framing provides a scaffolding for perceiving and articulating patterns among its disparate, and perhaps contending, elements. Frames, like metaphors (in a cognitive linguistics perspective; discussed further in the next section), are implicit theories of a situation: They model prior thought and ensuing action, rendering that action sensible in terms of pre-existing thinking (Geertz, 1973; Lakoff & Johnson, 1987; Yanow, 1992, 2008; cf. Snow et al., 1986). What gets produced in the framing process is both a model of the world—reflecting prior sense-making—and a model for subsequent action in that world. Framing, then, does two kinds of work: It organizes prior knowledge (including that derived from experience) and values held, and it guides emergent action (cf. Rein & Schön, 1977, on diagnoses that contain prescriptions for action). Although for analytical purposes it can be useful to separate the two, they typically work simultaneously and interactively, and at the level of tacit, not conscious, knowledge. The sense-making that framing works to achieve takes place in the midst of acting; it is not a conscious, explicitly planned and strategized activity; and enactments of meaning are every bit as much a part of framing processes as the words used to talk about those ideas and acts.

The framing of a situation enacts the sense-making work that enables what Rein and Schön (1977) called a normative leap from what is to what ought to be (p. 240; see also Schön, 1983, p. 40; cf. Benford, 1997, p. 416, “signifying work”). Framing enables actors to understand a situation as being of a certain kind (enacted in categorizing, taken up in the next section), and they can start to imagine what could or should happen next in light of prior notions concerning the ways certain problems can and should be handled (Rein & Schön, 1977). Although Schön (1979/1993) stressed the cognitive character of this process, which might be taken to imply individual sense-making, policy settings involve more than that. Sense-making has an intersubjective aspect, drawing upon direct or indirect interaction with other actors (Weick, 1995; cf. the interactionist approach of Mead, 1934 and Goffman, 1959). Indeed, various modes of collective knowing, such as practices, cultures, and organizational learning, exhibit similar dimensions of group sense-making (see, for example, Cook & Yanow, 2011/1993; Schatzki, 2001). Sense-making can also entail interacting with non-human elements (cf. Schön, 1983, 1987, on reflective practitioners conversing with their materials). These interactions—including gestures and other modes of nonverbal expression, at times mediated by material objects—draw on more, or other, than cognitive ways of knowing alone. ¹³

An important part of the meanings of the acts, events, and things actors are confronted with resides not in those entities themselves or in the cognitive frames actors supposedly have, but arises, instead, in the course of interacting in and with those acts, events, and things. ¹⁴ Grasping framing’s dynamism rests on understanding that actors act toward things on the basis of the meanings things acquire for them in the course of that sense-making (cf. Blumer, 1969; Vickers, 1965, 1987, on appreciative settings and systems). Combining a Schönian line of thought in which practitioners are engaged in conversations with their materials and a Meadian−Goffmanian symbolic interactionist one, the sense-making work of framing can be seen to unfold as actors engage in a conversation with the situation, where “the situation” intermingles persons, acts, events, language, and/or objects. At a certain point in the process, actors attribute some initial meaning to the situation at hand, looking then to see what happens as a result. ¹⁵ This is an interactive and iterative process, in which details and generalities inform one another, a clearer idea of what is going on develops, and meanings “emerge.”

In sense-making work, talk and gesture, and observation of both, are highly interactive. There is no a priori sequencing to their appearance or mutual influence: Talk and action are not completely separable, as speech act and multimodal linguistics theorists have noted (Austin, 1975; Cienki & Müller, 2008). Moreover, both understanding and the ways of talking about those understandings develop in interacting with whatever it is actors are trying to make sense of. Much as members of a culture learn to interpret acts, objects, and language in particular ways, the meanings that things in a particular policy-making, implementation, or other situation have for actors is not given to them by that setting. “Culture” does not comprise a set of stable frames that drive all members of a culture (whether national, organizational, or some other) to see things in certain ways: Multiple influences are often at play; multiple possible interpretations co-exist within a single cultural “code,” and actors bring their own prior knowledge (from experiences, education, and other sources) to situational sense-making. We might say instead that actors draw on a repertoire of cultural resources in framing the situations they are confronted with.

Framing’s sense-making work proceeds in the midst of complexities arising from the multiple ways that multiple actors, whether individual or collective, potentially have of seeing a problematic situation, developed in the process of making sense of that situation. Different ways of seeing often (though not necessarily) entail different problem definitions and different solutions, which arise as various actors select various elements from a situation for attention and name and categorize similar ones differently.

Framing as the work of selecting, naming, and categorizing

In introducing the idea of policy framing (see also Schön & Rein, 1994), Rein and Schön (1977) talked about “the complementary process of naming and framing.” To explicate that relationship, we bring in two other features that work together with naming: selecting and categorizing. These three are framing devices in their own right.

Consider, for example, “Western European immigration policy.” The phrase does three things at once: It selects from among a range of possible features those that—from the framer’s perspective—warrant attention (mobility in, not out; permanent residence, not temporary labor), it names them, and it categorizes (European, not Canadian; Western, not Southern). Through all three of these, policy actors draw disparate elements together in a pattern, selecting some things as relevant or important and discarding, backgrounding or ignoring others, occluding other ways of seeing (and acting), and thereby silencing them in policy discourse and ensuing action (at least, from the perspective of that particular frame). As Rein and Schön (1977) remarked, “Whatever is said of a thing, denies something else of it” (p. 239). In these ways, framing lays the conceptual groundwork for possible future courses of action, and actors intersubjectively, interactively construct the socio-political world in and on which they act.

Selecting certain aspects of a worrisome situation for attention is a contingent, political act: Other features might have been selected; these might have brought other configurations of decision-makers and resources into play; and they might have focused on aspects of the situation that worry other societal groups (cf. Weick, 1995, on attending to situational cues). Even while it is contingent and political, such selecting is also a practical necessity, as it reduces the range of stimuli bombarding actors’ “sense (and sense-making) receptors” contributing to the ambiguities and uncertainties of the situation and of their possible responses, enabling them to frame the situation they are engaging in ways that they can act in and on.

For purposes of communicating about that framing, the features that are selected for attention have to be named. Such policy naming at times invokes metaphors: Concepts whose meaning(s) in other situations is (are) known and understood, such that their use in this situation (typically without conscious intent) makes what is going on clearer (Schön, 1963/2001, 1979/1993; see also, van Hulst, 2008; Yanow, 2008). Political decision-makers often use metaphors that are common currency within their own socio-political communities or cultures; they may also have drawn on those metaphors on previous occasions, reflecting their accustomed ways of dealing with situations (e.g., van Hulst, 2008).

In whatever form naming takes, situational elements are categorized, as the “Western European immigration” example shows. Even if objects, events, acts, and actors might arrive already categorized (e.g., in news reports talking about “the living standard of immigrants” in a certain country), situation-specific categorizing of sense data and interpretations of these always have to take place (see Bowker & Star, 1999; Lakoff, 1987; Yanow, 2003). Categorizing, itself a form of naming, entails identifying things as a “this” but not a “that.” (Naming can also draw distinctions, but it does so less explicitly than categorizing.) Differences are thereby established between, for instance, natives and immigrants, friends and enemies, victims and perpetrators, normal and abnormal, old and new, work and pleasure, fight and play—whatever is relevant to the issue at hand. Even when category names do not appear in full-fledged taxonomies—as in the “Western Europe” example—other elements in the category set are present by implication (Eastern Europe, Africa, North America—as relevant to the policy context).

Like selecting and naming (including metaphorizing), categorizing is a framing device: All of these can be ways of highlighting some aspects of a policy discourse while occluding and even silencing others, as noted above. In this sense, selecting, naming, and categorizing are “ways of world-making,” to use Nelson Goodman’s (1978) phrase. The initial framing or operational “definition” of a policy situation is a way of making a world one can act in, and upon. In the world of policy and administrative practices, framing an issue is a condition for being able to do one’s work. Selecting, naming, and categorizing are ways not only of shaping the world that one has made, but of knowing it (although we certainly do not mean to suggest that policy or other actors have the socio-political and/or physical powers to create and change their worlds at will). Street-level bureaucrats, for instance, select certain features of the clients they meet as they categorize the clients’ cases and decide how to handle them (Lipsky, 1980). In another example, calling a policy event or situation “worrisome” or “problematic,” thereby distinguishing it from the non-problematic commonplace, is a key world-making or framing act. Which situations get labeled problematic is ultimately contingent: As Murray Edelman (1988) taught us, “conditions that hurt people need not become [accepted as] problems” (p. 13). Although often only one feature of a situation is explicitly named, thereby framing the situation (as in calling something “an act of terrorism”), other, unnamed features (the repertoire of name- or category- and policy-relevant elements) may help to establish that meaning (or contest it).

Framing as the work of storytelling

Theorizing policy framing must also include an account of storytelling because of their relationship, something Laws and Rein (2003) and Stone (2006) also note. Although Rein and Schön’s first and last joint publications engaged both storytelling (1977) and narrative frames (1996) and their 1994 book talks in passing, in theoretical terms, about turning a situation that is experienced as worrisome, uncertain, ambiguous, and probably problematic into a policy issue by telling a story about it (Schön & Rein, 1994; cf. Schön, 1979/1993), they do not elaborate on how framing works through storytelling.

Beyond selecting and naming some elements and ignoring others, framing also entails “bind[ing] together the salient features of the situation . . . into a pattern that is coherent and graspable” (Rein & Schön, 1977, p. 239; emphasis added; cf. “weaving a connection,” Gamson & Modigliani, 1989, and “frame resonance,” Snow & Benford, 1988, in social movement frame theory). Such “binding together” into a pattern is what storytelling achieves (Gabriel, 2000; van Hulst, 2012), and it does this work through “narrative frames” (Rein & Schön, 1996; van Hulst, Siesling, van Lieshout, & Dewulf, 2014) or plot lines. These attribute sense to a situation, drawing on “narrative” or “prose” rather than the explicit logical structure of argumentation, for instance, or outline. ¹⁶ Stories frame their subjects as they narrate them, explicitly naming their features, selecting and perhaps categorizing them as well, explaining to an audience what has been going on, what is going on, and, often, what needs to be done—past, present, and future corresponding to the plot line of a policy story. ¹⁷ By contrast, names, metaphors, and categories frame their policy issues without fully, and explicitly, narrating the stories that they condense (e.g., “homelessness”; Schön & Rein, 1994), which remain implicit within them (cf. Edelman, 1964/1985, p. 198, on symbols “condens[ing] a range of ideas, feelings, and sentiments”). Where the naming and categorizing aspects of framing might be expressed in one word (e.g., “communist,” “creationist”), stories elaborate on the perceived policy problem (and perhaps its envisioned solution).

Storytelling achieves its “certain kind of work” (Schön, 1983, p. 40; see also Forester, 1999, p. 29) through introducing and narrating new selections, names, and category schemes or reimagining those already available, gluing these elements together by “emplotting” them (see also Czarniawska, 1998, p. 2). That plot weaves story elements together into a text that makes sense as a whole: sketching out the situation in which actors find themselves, establishing a situation’s beginnings, tracing its development from something unnoticed or perceived as normal to something perceived as worrisome and/or experienced as problematic, and suggesting or pointing to a possible resolution or “end” (Stone, 1988/2002; van Hulst, 2012; but see Shenhav, 2005, on political stories’ lack of closure). As policy-making entails collective action, and policy-relevant actors often do not agree on what is happening and what needs to or should be done, persuasion is called for. In providing plot lines that tie elements together in logical, even motivational or causal ways, storytelling is often key to such persuasive efforts (Rein & Schön, 1977; see also Throgmorton, 1992; van Hulst, 2012, in the context of planning practice; Sørensen, 2006, on storytelling’s role in governance; Shenhav, 2007, in political settings more broadly; Boje, 1991; Czarniawska, 1998; Gabriel, 2000; Hummel, 1991; Ingersoll & Adams, 1992; White, 1992, in organizational studies and public administration). Storytelling of this sort may be found not only during policy design, but also during implementation as individuals frame their policy-related concerns by telling their stories about, for instance, housing, legal, welfare, and other problems to the public administrators who deal with their cases (e.g., Bennett, 1979; Dubois, 2010; van Hulst, 2013).

In aiming to persuade, storytelling typically moves beyond “mere” problem definition (Forester, 1999, 2009). In telling the story behind their problems, policy-relevant actors typically reach back in time to a moment when all was well, sketching the context in which certain worries came into being (van Hulst, 2012). They narrate the history, their history, of what went wrong. With more time, they might relate what matters to them and what they fear might happen. Whereas such storytelling is often meant to persuade (Stone, 1988/2002; van Hulst, 2012), resting at times on stereotypical characters and stereotypical depictions of settings and actions, it might also be a vehicle for contending parties to listen to others and their views, to reflect and even reframe (Forester, 1999, 2009). Indeed, as Forester (2009) notes, it may “be more difficult to hurt each other once we know one another’s stories” (p. 187).

Telling stories about a developing situation involves fitting unfolding events into the plot. Even in stories that weave together the most surprising events (from the perspective of their narrators) or those that seem to be “the same old story” (the same actors being cast as heroes and villains over and over again), storytellers might be working hard backstage (to draw in Goffman, 1959) to incorporate new elements. And that new material might actually destabilize the story. What is paramount for purposes of persuasion is that framing produces a depiction of reality that is credible—that “rings true” —and which enables actors to engage in action. Stories do that work. As Weick (1995) put it, when it comes to acting in practice, plausibility suffices; accuracy is hardly aimed for (if it can ever be achieved). A story, in other words, is “good” when it not only creates a coherent, graspable account, but also “holds disparate elements together long enough to energize and guide action” (Weick, 1995, p. 61).

In telling about policy action and its human and non-human actors, policy framing stories implicitly or explicitly attribute blame or praise and suggest causes of harm or success; they set out “a view of what is wrong and what needs fixing” (Schön, 1979/1993, p. 144). As various policy-relevant actors bring different and conflicting experiences, expectations, desires, and fears to policy situations or develop these in them, conflicts over the interpretation(s) and meaning(s) of these narrated stories can be expected, and negotiations over their meaning(s) may take place. In this persuasive sense, framing through storytelling manifests discursive power.

Framing the substance of policy issues

The policy “what” that gets framed through the iterative selecting, naming, categorizing, and storytelling processes discussed in the previous section is primarily the world of ideas relevant to the policy issue at hand (Rein & Schön, 1986, 1993, Schön & Rein, 1994, chap. 2)—their meaning(s) for various issue-relevant interpretive communities. In analyzing U.S. abortion policy and its supporters and opponents, for instance, Luker (1984) explores the two camps’ (pro-life, pro-choice) framing of the idea of motherhood. Swaffield (1998) examines the meanings of “landscape” to various parties to debates over New Zealand planning and natural resource policies. Schmidt (2000) links the meanings of U.S. “English-only” language policy to different ideas and values—frames—concerning immigrants and their integration into society. Rasmussen (2011) shows how competing framings of contraception as preventive care, which would require health insurance coverage, themselves, also construct issue categories.

In the momentary “freezing” of actors’ policy positions for purposes of description and analysis, framings take on a static aspect. But looking within these for the more dynamic, political character of policy framing brings two additional dimensions to the fore: the ways in which policy-relevant actors’ identities and the relationships between and among them can also be a focus of policy framing, and the ways in which policy processes, themselves, can be subject to framing.

Framing policy-relevant actors’ identities and relationships

Conflicts over the meanings of policy situations may be rooted not just in different views of the issues at stake. Such conflicts may also be located in policy-relevant actors’ senses of their own and other actors’ identities and the relationships between or among them, including identities that those actors cherish (Forester, 1999, 2009; Sinha & Gasper, 2009). Framing works to construct these identities, as well as their relationships to one another. These ideas arose in passing in Schön and Rein’s (1994, Part III) theorizing as they considered that the shared interests of actors involved in policy conflict, along with their willingness to reframe a problematic situation jointly, might help them envision pragmatic solutions to even the most intractable of policy issues. We think there is more to it than that.

Policy-relevant actors’ identities can become strongly intertwined with a particular framing of a policy issue. They might discover their calling, earn their keep, find friends or partners, or be in some other way(s) drawn into the articulation of a particular framing of a policy issue, or tied in with the organization or group that has constructed, supported, or fought that framing. They might, in other words, become “attached” to their problems, not just through formal political acts (e.g., having voted for some option), but also in emotional, psychological, social, and/or cultural ways. A public change to that position might feel to them like losing a part of who they are—their social and/or political identity, or part of that. For actors involved in intractable controversies, then, reframing the policy issue might involve reconceptualizing not only vested interests but also personal identities—identities that are interwoven with beliefs that the world is or ought to be as they perceive it. Schön saw this from the perspective of social systems—he referred both to organizations and parts of them and to communities—and their power over individuals: “Threats to the social system threaten this framework” of meaning, he wrote. Their power

. . . becomes understandable, I think, only if we see that social systems provide for their members not only sources of livelihood, protection against outside threat and the promise of economic security, but a framework of theory, values and related technology which enables individuals to make sense of their lives. (Schön, 1971, p. 51)

Yet he did not tie this in with the difficulties of reframing. At issue is an understanding of identity as more than a surface layer that can be put on, taken off, or otherwise altered at will. Reframing in such circumstances is not always easily done; actors need to find ways in the new framing of giving expression to what is meaningful to them.

Framing the policy process

The framing of the policy process itself can also be subject to framing, which returns us to Bateson’s point of departure in a view that brings framing’s communicative work into focus.

Consider, for instance, disagreement and debate that may unfold concerning the process through which an immigration policy, say, has come onto the policy-making agenda. The narrative concerning which party or person introduced the policy in Congress or Parliament, responding to which specific “triggering event(s)” (e.g., the assassination of a key immigration opponent), and who voted for and against it says little to nothing, explicitly, about the substance of the policy, but everything about its social, cultural, political, and/or other context. “The Labour Party’s bill, blocked by the Greens,” for instance, might be something a journalist would say in commenting on the policy process; the Labour Party itself could also comment on what is transpiring in their exchanges with the Greens. In other words, such framing of the policy-making process tells a story about the storytelling and other policy activities. That is Bateson’s notion of meta-communication: the ways in which people communicate about what is being communicated (how the monkeys, for example, communicate that what they are doing is playing, not fighting). It is manifest in the concept of meta-governance in public administration theorizing, which takes place when the framing of self-governing institutions and networks is “exercised through the shaping of the political, financial, and organizational context[s] within which self-governance takes place” (Sørensen, 2006, p. 101).

Meta-communication can complicate matters as it allows for endlessly recursive sense-making loops concerning policy processes, a sort of “I think that you think that I think that you think . . ..” It is, however, very important for a theory of policy framing because through such meta-communication, actors try to determine the kind of policy-making they and others will undertake. Such recursive sense-making can entail a reflective practice, to the extent that policy-relevant actors might explore and perhaps question the basic assumptions guiding their thinking and actions, especially when these are bringing them into conflict with each other. This reflective process could help those actors see their own policy framing, possibly enabling them to grasp how it is preventing them from exerting fundamental efforts to change the policy under debate.