Ageing Into the Apocalypse : Exploring How Age and Institutionalisation Shapes Environmental Organisations through Apocalyptic Framing and Blame Attribution

Abstract: This study investigated how the age of an environmental movement organisation and its degree of institutionalisation impacted the usage of threat-related framing and blame attribution in regards to environmental issues. Environmental discourse has lately developed a rhetoric that embraces urgency and severity, but how different types of environmental movement organisations have approached this, historically and today, has not been widely studied. A mixed-methods approach was therefore employed that thematically examined texts from the Swedish branch of Extinction Rebellion and The Swedish Society for Nature Conservation at several points in time. The analysis indicated that the degree of institutionalisation had an influence on the organisation’s blame attribution, whilst age did not. Furthermore, no conclusive implications followed the analysis of the organisation’s framings. The study concluded that the degree of institutionalisation is an important factor behind how environmental movement organisations choose their blame attribution. The study provided insights into how institutionalisation affects strategic choices of movement organisations, possibly providing a foundation for future research in the field.