From Frankenstein to the Good Mother: the use of frames in the strategic communication about sustainability

This article studies which frames stakeholders use in the debate about sustainability. An inductive framing analysis has been conducted on a diverse sample of communications (N = 578) including advertisements, website texts and brochures of farming federations, the food industry consumer organisations, and interest groups in Flanders and French-speaking Belgium. This qualitative content analysis leads to the reconstruction of six dominant frames accompanied with a list of indicators that help to recognize these frames in messages. The analysis also addresses the question how stakeholders strategically use these frames in their communication with the general audience. The analysis shows that none of the frames is exclusively used by one of the stakeholders.