Energy policy and ruling class hegemony : the dissemination of corporate policy preference via teachers and textbooks

The objectives of this study were twofold: (1) to develop a model of corporate policy preferences concerning energy and to use this model to describe the attitudes of a sample (N=253) of science teachers and the content of a sample (N=15) of science textbooks, and (2) to compare teachers who were characterized by the corporate energy model to teachers who were not. Four variables, attitudes toward energy growth rate, conventional energy sources, nuclear technologies, and government control of energy resources, were derived from the corporate model and used to describe the survey and content samples. After considering significance and distribution direction, three hypotheses were judged to be supported. Three others were rejected because the distribution was inappropriate. Two hypotheses were judged to be unsupported because of insignificance. The one dominant pattern in the descriptive analysis was the favorable view towards nuclear technologies expressed by both the teachers and the textbooks.

The second objective of this study was to explain teacher adherence to corporate policy preferences. Adherence to corporate policy was operationalized as attitude toward energy growth rate (i.e., corporate policy is assumed to prefer a positive energy growth rate). As a variable, attitude toward energy growth rate lacked a history of investigation, sociological or otherwise. In an exploratory effort, ten variables, used in studies of related topics (e.g., pollution, technology, specific energy sources), were derived from a review of the energy and environment literature. These ten variables and the three others from the corporate model became the independent variables. The thirteen variables were hypothesized to distinguish between teachers who favored a positive energy growth rate and those who favored a negative or zero growth rate. The hypothesized relationships were based upon hegemony theory.

Stepwise discriminant analysis was used to evaluate the hypotheses about energy growth rate. Of the thirteen variables, four were chosen as having an optimal amount of discriminating power. The four were: (1) economic concern about energy policy, (2) sex of respondent, (3) undergraduate major, and (4) attitude toward nuclear technologies. After considering the relationship direction, four hypotheses were judged to be supported. Nine others were judged unsupported when the independent variables were rejected by the discriminant analysis. Of the supported hypotheses, one was a variable from the corporate model, one was an attitudinal variable from the literature, and two were background variables from the literature. A classification test with a second group of respondent cases showed that the four variables selected by the stepwise procedure did discriminate between the two groups of teachers at a level better than chance. The relationships found offer limited support for hegemony theory. The results call for further research since the effort was exploratory.