Abstract
Social groups that suffer the most from irresponsible corporate practices often find themselves lacking the essential material, political, or social resources necessary to directly influence corporate managers towards implementing appropriate corrective measures. The question of how affected communities can effectively leverage symbolic resources to persuade influential actors, such as resource providers, to align with their moral demands assumes paramount importance, given its normative and strategic implications.In response to this challenge, this thesis proposes to examine the rhetorical use of collective memories in the discursive elaboration and articulation of grievances, in context of corporate social irresponsibility. The following research question is considered: how collectively remembered events, symbols or experiences can be effectively harnessed to construct moral arguments? The purpose is to generate insights that allow theorizing about the discursive tactics that employ collective memory as a resource to enhance the persuasive capacity and legitimacy of frames for collective action.
To achieve this goal, the thesis elaborates a memory-informed framing perspective: a framework that integrates the concept of collective memory with strategic framing, using insights of the former to advance the latter. Additionally, it develops an innovative methodology for reproducing the structure of argumentation of collective action frames from the bottom to the top, from cultural symbols to context-specific cognitive schemas. This framework is then applied to examine a case of corporate environmental irresponsibility in southern Italy. The case involves a community exposed to polluting emissions from a steel mill previously condemned for environmental transgression. Findings highlights the importance of grounding claims on social referents such as historical precedents. Such references provide SMOs with images, programs and standards that are both relevant and appropriate to formulate legitimate judgements and evaluations about the present.
| Date of Award | 27 Jan 2025 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Samantha Parsley (Supervisor), Diego Vazquez-Brust (Supervisor) & Hamid Foroughi (Supervisor) |