About
21
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Introduction
I study resistance to change campaigns in organizations and communities, with particular attention to information avoidance and implementation communication, often in sustainability contexts. This often requires intersecting strategic, organizational and environmental communication, using methods ranging from qualitative interviews to surveys to content analyses. I frequently situate this work in the energy field, and have extensive experience developing and delivering multi-partner research programs.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
August 2017 - present
August 2015 - December 2015
January 2016 - present
Publications
Publications (21)
Efforts to effect racial health disparity (RHD) policy change are urgent, necessary, and subject to a key barrier: defensiveness among White privileged audiences. Within the literature to date, such defensiveness is under-investigated, and when examined, is typically conceived of as an individual cognitive outcome—a message effect—rather than a com...
Information avoidance (IA) is a prevalent information behavior that is used by people to understand and act on environmental issues, yet is understudied in the environmental field, leaving us with an incomplete picture of environmental communication processes and outcomes. Compounding this partial knowledge is a lack of research into people’s own c...
Cultivating seafood in water environments, global aquaculture production is on the rise. As the sector grows, however, so too do challenges in securing the necessary social license to operate (SLO): ongoing approval from various stakeholders. Previous research in both risk communication and SLO suggests that perceived justice plays a foundational r...
Risk information avoidance is widespread, and happens in contexts ranging from the personal to civic spheres. Disciplines from communication to psychology have been exploring the avoidance phenomena for decades, yet we lack a unifying theoretical model to understand it. To develop such a model, we start with the planned risk information-seeking mod...
Although communication, broadly, is often identified as a key factor across campus sustainability initiatives, few studies have examined specific information behaviors that can affect reception of such efforts. We therefore seek to characterize motives for a key communication barrier to campus sustainability efforts: environmental information avoid...
Class tested assignments: a sequential series of assignments and an activity developed for senior PR students in a capstone PR management and research class.
In 2013, the American public ranked climate change at the very bottom of 21 policy issues that they believed the President and Congress should deal with. Yet by 2021, the climate issue was at the forefront of most policy agendas and was a much more salient concern in terms of public opinion. This chapter looks at the role of television, especially...
Courses
Undergraduate courses in environmental communication, with crisis communication or public relations variations.
Objectives
After completing this unit activity, students will have a better understanding of how communication contributes to the complexity and interconnections of environmental challenges by exploring crisis communication respo...
Programs aimed at implementing change in organizations regularly experience high failure rates. Exploring resistance to change is one promising way to better understand what might be done to improve these rates. Resistance to change has often been envisioned as employee noncompliance with one-way change messages. This study instead conceptualizes r...
BOOK REVIEW Brian Southwell, Elizabeth Doran and Laura Richman’s: Innovations in Home Energy Use: a Sourcebook for Behavior Change RTI Press, 2016. What causes climate change? Recent media reports have focused on topics as varied as capitalism, oil consumption, and cow belches (Jacobs 2016; Karp 2016; Overgaard 2016). Yet environmental studies and...
This article reviews a research program that began in the 1990s (see Shanahan 1996; Shanahan & McComas, 1997; McComas, Shanahan & Butler 2001) that has been revisited only sporadically. The research was conceptualized in the late 80s and reached a first period of fruition in the mid 1990s, as an extension of the Cultural Indicators project, which i...
Although research suggests that feedback on energy usage can generate savings in residential and organizational settings, investigations into the effectiveness of comparative feedback efforts have been fragmented and the findings inconclusive. To help fill this gap, we present research on the effectiveness of a comparative feedback campaign in prom...
Although research suggests that feedback on energy usage can generate savings in residential and organizational settings, investigations into the effectiveness of comparative feedback efforts have been fragmented and the findings inconclusive. To help fill this gap, we present research on the effectiveness of a comparative feedback campaign in prom...
In 2009, Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) initiated a study
into the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of its faculty, staff, and graduate students about
energy conservation at work. Formative survey research following the framework of the
Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991) examined the influences of beliefs, perceive...
This project uses content analysis to investigate normative communication processes and associated emotion in two case studies. Individuals were formed into groups and used a mobile health application, VERA, to perform 'health behaviors' (such as indicating what they were eating or their exercise behaviors) for other group members via mobile posts....
I am an uncredited contributor to the case study entitled: Marketing Highlight: Is your family prepared?
