Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Constructivists may have made their case too well in the past decade. In providing norms-based explanations for phenomena in world politics, they have reinforced a notion of social norms as static social facts leading to an ironic undertheorizing of the dynamics of social norms. This paper addresses this concern by focusing on the process of normative contestation. Social norms are contested at every turn?in their emergence, as actors are socialized, and even once they are established and internalized. Contestation is thus inherent in the process through which actors come to understand norms and institutions, act on their understandings and alter norms and institutions. In this paper I develop a framework for examining normative evolution through contestation and I apply it to a brief case study of the governance of climate change. I explain how norm contestation and the consequent evolution of normative understandings has and continues to drive climate change politics and the rift between the United States and most of the rest of the world since the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in 1997.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Norm Life Cycle or Norms Cycle of Life?: Inequality, International Norm Dynamics and Ecologically Sustainable Sufficiency

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) and the Social Norms Approach (SNA) both stress the important influence that normative perceptions have on behavioral intentions and behavior. These 2 approaches were used to examine the behavioral intention to limit drinking to 0 to 4 drinks. Further, this study examined whether perception of subjective norms, university and U.S. level descriptive norms, and university and U.S. level injunctive norms represented separate dimensions for this behavioral intention. A representative sample of 1110 college students completed a web-based survey. The results confirmed that the 5 types of norms were all unique constructs. This study also found that individuals’ intentions to limit their alcohol consumption to 0 to 4 drinks were predicted by positive attitudes, perceived behavioral control, and subjective norms. Subjective norms also moderated the relationship between attitudes and behavioral intention. University descriptive norms also served as a moderator. This study has important implications for future normative interventions.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Since the early 1990s, the emergent norm of humanitarian intervention has allegedly transformed the uses of force and redefined military power. States have been pressed to intervene militarily, and they have indeed launched armed interventions to protect foreign people from violence perpetrated or permitted by the government of the target state. Furthermore, humanitarian principles have been invoked, among others, to justify the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Encouraged and sanctioned by the United Nations and by some non-governmental organizations, legitimized by the advocates of the responsibility to protect, these interventions led to a significant transformation of the uses of force. However, while some military strategists – and some military organizations – accepted and endorsed the humanitarian intervention norm, others rejected it, and others still attempted to shape it while adjusting their professional identity. Why? How can we explain the diversity of military responses to the humanitarian intervention norm? What are the consequences of these different responses for the norm itself and its influence? I argue that these various adaptive paths are likely to depend on the strategies that military organizations undertake to alter the normative situations, domestic and international, confronting them. To explore the politics of military doctrine, this paper notably revisits and puts to the task the resource dependency approach in organization theory (Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978). The goal of the paper is to identify, compare and comprehend the varied responses of U.S., British, Italian, French and German armies to the humanitarian intervention norm.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Pluralistic ignorance on the norm of ideal thinness for women, third-person perceptions about the influence of thin idealized images in mass media, and the relationship between pluralistic ignorance and the third-person perception were examined. Both women and men overestimated thinness preferred by other women and men. Men in dating relationships overestimated thinness preferred by their female dating partners, while women in dating relationships had accurate estimations of their male dating partners’ norms of ideal thinness. Both women and men also overestimated the influence of the thin ideal on other women and men. However, third-person perceptions were not found in dating relationships. When the third-person perceptions about the media effect were tested, along with people’s own norms of ideal thinness, the two variables accounted for a significant amount of variance in biased perceptions about the norm of ideal thinness.