Japan Meets the Sharing Economy: Contending Frames

The ‘sharing economy’ epitomized by Airbnb and Uber has challenged business, labor, and regulatory institutions throughout the world. The arrival of Airbnb and Uber in Japan provided an opportunity for Prime Minister Abe’s administration to demonstrate its commitment to deregulation. Both platform companies garnered support from powerful governmental and industry actors who framed the sharing economy as a solution to various economic and social problems. However, they met resistance from actors elsewhere in government, the private sector, and civil society, who constructed competing frames. Unlike studies that compare national responses to the sharing economy, we contrast the different experiences and fates of Airbnb and Uber within a single country. Doing so highlights actors, framing processes, and within-country heterogeneity. The study reveals the limits of overly institutionalized understandings of Japanese political economy. It also contributes to current debates concerning Prime Minister Abe’s efforts at implementing deregulation during the 2010s.

Framing conflicts in digital and transnational media environments

This article provides an overview of established and emerging approaches to frame analysis as a tool for analysing dynamics of political conflicts. It first surveys the approaches taken by contributors to this special issue and notes some implications for further research. The second part of the article then outlines four ways in which digital platforms and transnational information flows might influence the way framing contests play out in current and future media environments. These include: (1) fragmentation within media systems; (2) increasing transnational information flows that potentially create transnational publics; (3) altered framing processes and effects in the more complex networked environments; and (4) architectures and emerging logics of digital platforms. The authors believe these four factors will become crucial for understanding the connections between frame competition and political conflicts.

How Policies Become Contested: A Spiral of Imagination and Evidence in a Large Infrastructure Project.

This article investigates how framing processes lead to polarization in the public debate on a large infrastructure project. Drawing on an analysis of newspaper articles about the Oosterweelconnection in Antwerp (Belgium), it concludes that framing through imaginative appeals and framing through evidence mutually reinforce each other in a spiralling pattern. When evidence backs up appeals to the imagination, such as when facts back up metaphors, these appeals are endowed with authority and hence legitimacy. While this strengthens appeals that have been ”proven” to be true, it also makes actors backing these appeals increasingly frustrated with other parties that still refuse to accept them. Because of their frustration, the former are spurred to launch new imaginative appeals conveying their anger and to seek new evidence to substantiate these new appeals. Over time, as parties in a conflict grapple with evidence and imagination, their tolerance for ambiguity decreases and the debate polarizes.

Risk Shift: An Institutional Logics Perspective

This study uses the concept of institutional logics and the framing processes emanating from these guiding logics to understand how risk is shifted through public policies. The study concludes that Hacker’s argument that public policies have reconstructed markets to aid the privileged by shifting risk onto the less privileged may have underestimated some of the complexities driving the phenomenon, particularly those stemming from actors having to cope with conflicting logics and ambiguity concerning policy solutions to seemingly intractable challenges. Risk shift does not necessarily involve unilateral transfer of risk from policy makers to risk bearers. Risk shift can emerge out of the complex microinteractions among relevant actors and the framing processes guided by competing logics or belief systems in which the collaborating actors are embedded.