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George Ferns learned about the fossil fuel divestment movement as a doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh. Ferns became interested in People & Planet, the United Kingdom’s largest student network for human rights and environmental justice as a researcher who wanted to understand the group’s ambitious agenda and accomplishments. How, he wondered, did environmental campaigners gain traction in their efforts to tarnish the fossil fuel industry, one of business’s most massive and powerful incumbents?
Ferns, now a lecturer in organization studies and sustainability at Cardiff University Business School, teamed up with Aliette Lambert, a lecturer in management, marketing, business, and society at the University of Bath’s Centre for Qualitative Research, and Maik Günther, a doctoral candidate in the School of Business and Economics at the Freie Universität Berlin, to investigate how exactly climate activists successfully stigmatized the fossil fuel industry, a victory of David over Goliath.
The three researchers conducted interviews with activists and other central players in the global divestment movement and scrutinized their discursive practices. Sifting through a corpus of 342 texts produced between 2011 and 2017 by climate activists—most distributed by 350.org, a climate action group founded by author and environmentalist Bill McKibben, and student-led campaigns such as People & Planet—the authors examined the power of language and moral suasion.
They found that climate activists used analogies to link fossil fuels to the tobacco industry and the divestment movement to the struggle against South African apartheid. Through the movement’s deliberate analogy-making, it constructed a moral dualism: a moral “ingroup” of activists and an immoral “outgroup” of the fossil fuel industry, leaving no middle ground between the two.
Climate activists have long recognized that financially bankrupting the fossil fuel industry and weakening its iron grip over world capitals using traditional tactics such as protests would be nigh impossible. So they adopted divestment as “a symbolic tool” with the goal of stigmatizing a sector that reaps profits by exacerbating the climate crisis. “They’re trying to make people believe that there’s something fundamentally flawed on a moral level with the fossil fuel industry,” Ferns says. “And historical analogies stir emotion in us. As an activist, you can borrow the emotive charge from a historical event.”
The strategy for dispersing the moral dualism was twofold, Ferns explains. Through the practice of “proximal adaptation,” the divestment movement assembled a large group of stakeholders who were already steeped in climate activism. Veteran of the anti-apartheid campaign Archbishop Desmond Tutu, progressive intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein, and the Guardian newspaper joined the divestment campaign, spread its message, and attracted media attention. The second practice, what the authors call “distant enactment,” drew a different set of stakeholders who were not closely affiliated with radical environmentalism. The UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), national governments, and the World Bank were brought on board through efforts to reframe divestment as a financial tool, thereby reducing any associations with radical activism.
“To me, the greatest value of this study is its theoretical focus on analogy and metaphor,” Eero Vaara, a professor of organizations and impact at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, says. “Analogy and metaphor are very important elements in our sensemaking but very difficult to conceptualize and hard to pin down in empirical research. Through both rational and emotional rhetoric that often draws on analogy and metaphor, our conceptions of things develop and change, and this is also how movements can mobilize other actors to join.”
The authors’ analysis uncovered how analogical comparisons stigmatized the fossil fuel industry and—equally important—convinced others of the morality of divestment campaigners. “You cannot, as a movement, only shame big companies and rely entirely on the language of death and destruction,” Ferns says. “When activists used analogies to the struggle against apartheid, they were able to convince the public of their morality. That’s what legitimated them in the eyes of the public but also financiers and university endowment boards, which can be quite conservative.” To succeed, Ferns and his coauthors show, a movement must convince people that it is moral. Climate campaigners fundamentally grasped the extent to which no one will disagree that tobacco is unhealthy or that apartheid is immoral.
“This research is very timely and needed,” Vaara says. “We all know that climate change and the fight against fossil fuels are key issues that warrant attention—right now. Of course, the findings can also be applied, with due caution, to other social movements.”
George Ferns, Aliette Lambert, and Maik Günther, “The Analogical Construction of Stigma as a Moral Dualism: The Case of the Fossil Fuel Divestment Movement,” Academy of Management Journal, forthcoming.
Read more stories by Daniela Blei.