Is it good to work with? Workability and the meaning of non-native species in urban policy

Abstract Research on social problems often analyzes how different groups think or act in relation to a single issue. Less frequent are studies of how a single group thinks or acts in relation to many phenomena, any of which may be construed as problematic to a greater or lesser degree. We take this multiple phenomena – single social position approach and analyze why the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA), a supra-municipal government agency, discusses some non-native species as more “invasive” than others. We use word embeddings to measure variation in the strength of association between different species and invasiveness in 599 of the TRCA’s policy documents and employ generalized additive models to explain this variation. We find that the “invasive” meaning is more strongly associated with species that are easier to observe, access, control, or manage in the TRCA’s urban context, which we term workability. Species that are terrestrial, sessile, and moderately abundant are more strongly associated with invasiveness than mobile, aquatic, and hyperabundant species. These findings suggest that problem managers conceive of issues they are responsible for managing according to how actionable problems appear. We propose workability as a key analytic lens for understanding how problem managers make decisions and construct meaning. We situate this contribution in the context of four research designs for studying social problems that we term comparative problem-solving designs.