| The discipline of social marketing has yet to reach its fullest potential. Dedicated to using communication as a means of bringing about positive social change, it nonetheless privileges a consumer-oriented, behavior-driven approach based on marketing principles and a rationally-based, individual decision-making paradigm. Such an approach is overly reductive, neglecting the cultural and structural forces that impinge on our social relations.;This dissertation aims to enhance social marketing's capacity to serve as a tool for social change by incorporating a cultural dimension that also accounts for structural concerns. It introduces the work of John B. Thompson who, in his extensive work on culture and ideology, argues for the primacy of meaning and its impact on the material conditions of our lives. But Thompson acknowledges that analysis is not enough. Creating positive social change depends on the active reconstruction of meaning. This is where framing theory comes in. It provides an entry into the struggle over meaning and its power to effect social change.;Yet framing theory itself is underdeveloped. The empirical research in this dissertation, therefore, attempts to explore some key framing issues. Conducted through an ethnographic study within a social marketing agency, a number of key questions were addressed. What are the conceptual methodological parameters for developing frames? What are the rules and routines? Who is involved in creating frames? Who has authority? Is there a particular discourse around framing? Where is ideology embedded and how is it manifested? Because the scholarship has not explored these questions, we do not know what it takes to construct a frame that will motivate social change. We do not know how an effective frame gets developed. The findings are new to the field given that, to my knowledge, no one has previously looked at the internal operations of an agency as it prepares its clients' work.;The end result is a reconceputalized model of social marketing in which meaning---in the form of frames---is put front and centre. In this framework, social marketing might be employed as a cultural means of influencing change through the construction and reconstruction of meaning and representation. |
