How is the SL measured?
Measurement methods
The social licence amounts to social acceptability or unacceptability. That is a perception. Because many things can be perceived as acceptable or unacceptable, there are many ways to measure the social licence. To choose one, you have to decide why you want to measure it. Each measurement technique has different strengths and weaknesses. Decide what you want to decide, then choose a measure. Often multiple decisions have to be made, which could mean using multiple measures.
We distinguish between the method used to obtain the perceptions and focal point of what is perceived. The method emphasizes the ‘social’ aspect of social acceptability. The content of what is measured emphasizes what matters for acceptability.
Public opinion surveys
This is probably the most well known technique among members of the general public because most have been approached to participate in a survey. It’s great strength is that it reveals one of the strongest pressures on politicians and regulators who report to politicians. When a government policy is under debate, or legal licence is in question, politicians become especially important stakeholders. Public opinion surveys can reveal, and even add to, the confluence of forces shaping political decisions.
Public opinion surveys can also provide important information when it is corporate (or NGO) policy that is in question. If the policy affects wide swaths of the population under consideration, executives benefit from knowing how acceptable different decisions would be.
One of the weaknesses of public opinion surveys is that when an operation is not a huge public controversy, public opinion surveys include the opinions of people who might not care very much about the operation, or who know very little about it. Often respondents to surveys give opinions when they really do not have one. If this is the majority, it can become expensive to find informed and involved respondents using this technique.
One-on-one interviews with stakeholder group leaders
Personal interviews with the spokespersons for stakeholder groups or organizations can include much more information than simply a measure of the social licence. They can also elicit stakeholder concerns, priorities, and preferred narratives in either a fixed option choice format or in open-ended comments. A special strength of this method is its suitability for eliciting information about the social network in which the interviewee is embedded. There is no better way to find out how influential each stakeholder is in the network and what conflicts or coalitions exist in the network.
Groups that meet the criteria for being stakeholders are, by definition, involved in the operation and therefore usually informed about it. Informed and involved stakeholders typically lead public opinion. Looking at what they say can tell you where public opinion will go if and when the operation becomes a public controversy. Of course, operators are interested in the opinions of stakeholder group leaders exactly because they want to prevent their operation from becoming a public controversy.
Media monitoring: Social or mainstream
The big advantage of this method is the frequency of updates. Readings can be taken daily, although a topic has to be quite controversial to yield daily commentary.
Technically, this method usually amounts to collecting the texts of comments. Even radio and television broadcasts can be automatically converted to text format. The reason for wanting text formats is to make the data suitable for input into automated computer analysis programs. Such programs can identify trends in which topics are getting the most attention while simultaneously rating the social licence being granted to specific target actors or activities mentioned in the comments.
What is accepted or rejected? The content of the perception.
Focus on the activity
Can be measured using …
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narrative analysis (e.g., Sharp, Bye & Cusick, 2019), and
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sentiment analysis (e.g., Medhat, Hassan & Korashy, 2014)
The focus of acceptability might be on the activity that needs a social licence. This is common when a whole industry is the focus of attention (e.g., fracking, ranching, social media platform provision). When a whole category of activity is controversial, there are probably competing narratives about the place of that activity in different visions for the future of the region, the nation, or the planet. This takes us into the realm of rival policy coalitions, contested discourses, and political propaganda. Even a seemingly local issue like the timing or frequency of heavy trucks using a stretch of road can be spun into grand narratives like human rights, environmental injustice, or climate change.
Focus on the organization doing the activity
Can be measured using …
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reputation analysis (e.g., Ponzi, Fombrun & Gardberg, 2011)
When the focus is on the organization, the social licence looks a lot like the organization’s reputation. Although corporate reputation has been studied for decades, all sorts of organizations suffering from a lack of trust and legitimacy today. News media outlets, and NGOs have been the most recent to see steep declines according to surveys by Edelman and GlobeScan.
Focus on the quality of the relationship
Can be measured using …
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Agree/disagree statements about relationship quality (Boutilier, 2017)
The relationship between the project operator and each stakeholder is sensitive to any and all types of problems that might arise. That makes perceptions of the the quality of the relationship a good summary of all aspects of the interaction, from questions of jobs and environmental impacts, to matters of mutual respect, transparency, and trustworthiness.
When the social licence concept was coined, it was the “social licence to operate”. The ‘operation’ was an extractive industry project like harvesting a forest or operating a mine. The stakeholders were mostly local residents, politicians, and outside environmental groups. The focus on the perceptions of the quality of relationship had the advantage of being comparable across operational sites and across time periods. The relationship satisfaction of the stakeholders in Mali could be compared directly with the relationship satisfaction of the stakeholders in Australia. Moreover, progress at a single operation could be tracked across the years.
For this approach to work well, there should be a relationship. That means choosing a method that includes interviews with the leaders or spokespersons for groups that are affected by the operation or that have an effect upon the operation. Members of the general public usually do not have a relationship with the operators.
Spontaneously expressed opinion on any aspect of the project
Can be measured using …
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sentiment analysis, natural language text processing (e.g., Bahr & Boutilier, 2019: SLaCDA program)
While some measures ask respondents to focus on the activity or the actor, sometimes stakeholders express opinions spontaneously with whatever focus they want. This happens when someone makes a tweet or posts an opinon on facebook. It also happens when news editors write editorials or broadcast news items on one event versus another. These free-range opinions can always be converted into text, if they were not that way to begin with.
Text analysis is usually paired with the social media and internet monitoring method. However, it can also be applied to open-ended answers obtained from telephone surveys and personal interviews with stakeholder group leaders.
Artificial intelligence applications known as sentiment analysis can classify a comment as positive or negative. Boutilier (2017) found these to correlate very highly with his agree/disagree measures of the social licence based on perceptions of the quality of the relationship. Bahr and Boutilier (2019) have developed a program called the Social Licence and Controversy Detector and Analyzer (SLaCDA) which not only does sentiment analysis but also identifies topics on the basis of how fequently they are mentioned in any text. It is useful for automatically detecting emerging issues and controversies.
References
Bahr, K. and R. G. Boutilier (2019). Social License Estimation and Issue Detection using Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing Techniques. The Computational Social Science Society of the Americas 10th Anniversary International Conference. Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Boutilier, R. G. (2017) “A measure of the SLO for infrastructure and extractive projects.” Available at:
https://tinyurl.com/y8a632kf
Medhat, W., A. Hassan and H. Korashy (2014). “Sentiment analysis algorithms and applications: a survey.” Ain Shams Engineering Journal, 5(4): 1093-1113.
Ponzi, L. J., C. J. Fombrun and N. A. Gardberg (2011). “RepTrak™ Pulse: Conceptualizing and Validating a Short-Form Measure of Corporate Reputation.” Corporate Reputation Review 14(1): 15-35.
Sharp, N. L., R. A. Bye and A. Cusick (2019). Narrative Analysis. Handbook of Research Methods in Health Social Sciences. P. Liamputtong. Singapore, Springer Singapore: 861-880.