In the United States, government agencies at the national and state levels increasingly have resolved conflict using collaborative tools such as facilitated negotiation, policy dialogues, mediation, and negotiated rule-making. Despite growing use of these tools, numerous writers caution against...

Despite the centrality of meaning to institutionalization, little attention has been paid to how meanings evolve and amplify to become institutionalized cultural conventions. We develop an interactional framing perspective to explain the microprocesses and mechanisms by which this occurs. We...