Handbook of Risk and Crisis Communication

Robert L. Heath, H. Dan O'Hair, Robert L. Heath, H. Dan O'Hair

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135597740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

The Handbook of Risk and Crisis Communication explores the scope and purpose of risk, and its counterpart, crisis, to facilitate the understanding of these issues from conceptual and strategic perspectives. Recognizing that risk is a central feature of our daily lives, found in relationships, organizations, governments, the environment, and a wide variety of interactions, contributors to this volume explore such questions as: "What is likely to happen, to whom, and with what consequences?"; "To what extent can science and vigilance prevent or mitigate negative outcomes?"; and "What obligation do some segments of local, national, and global populations have to help other segments manage risks?", shedding light on the issues in the quest for definitive answers.

The Handbook offers a broad approach to the study of risk and crisis as joint concerns. Chapters explore the reach of crisis and risk communication, define and examine key constructs, and parse the contexts of these vital areas. As a whole, the volume presents a comprehensive array of studies that highlight the standard principles and theories on both topics, serving as the largest effort to date focused on engaging risk communication discussions in a comprehensive manner.

With perspectives from psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, and communication, the Handbook of Risk and Crisis Communication enlarges the approach to defining and recognizing risk and how should it best be managed. It provides vital insights for all disciplines studying risk, including communication, public relations, business, and psychology, and will be required reading for scholars and researchers investigating risk and crisis in various contexts.

II Key Constructs of Crisis and Risk Communication

Section One focused attention on the overarching challenges of crisis and risk communication. It serves to give the big picture that frames the remaining chapters of this discussion. Building on what was established there as the reach of the disciplines, the chapters of this section address specific challenges that arise during matters of crisis and risk.

To that end, this part of the Handbook adopts a perspective employed decades ago by the iconic persuasion research team led by Hovland, Janis, and Kelly who shed many insights in what has been called the Yale Persuasion Research Project. Those pioneers reasoned that because the SMCR (source, message, channel, and receiver) model was a useful heuristic for conceptualizing the communication process it could help them and other researchers to define the key factors of the learning theory approach to persuasion and persuasive communication. In the same way, the chapters in Section Two focus, however generally, on the SMCR elements of communication. In deference to the pioneers of persuasion theory and with reserve and respect for the simplistic assumptions of that approach, we offer chapters that feature the key elements of the process. We recognize that the communication process can never easily be treated as “parts,” but it still seems logical to focus attention on requirements, challenges and frustrations that occur at each point of the process.

Chapter 7 features source and receiver variables, the concerns that should face risk communicators as well as advice born from decades of research and consulting practice. Employing psychological underpinnings of risk perception, Covello offers a practical philosophy of how risk communicators should approach the challenge of addressing perceptual factors that increase or decrease efforts to help interested parties understand risks and make enlightened choices as to their severity and manageability.

Chapter 8 adopts an educational design approach to designing messages addressed to local emergency managers. The centerpiece of this discussion by Rowan, Botan, Kreps, Samoilenko, and Farnsworth, is the CAUSE Model. One of the challenges faced by local emergency managers is to understand risks, plan for their occurrence, and gain community acceptance for the execution of a response plan. In this way, they may and often are expected to bring sound science and relatively technical plans into being in ways that foster trust for the plan and its implementation. In one sense, this challenge seems simple enough until we realize that coordinating a community response can be akin to herding cats, especially ones that are suffering various degrees of fear and denial. The acronym CAUSE stands for Confidence, Awareness, Understanding, Satisfaction, and Enactment. For our understanding of message design challenges, this chapter offers a practical approach developed through research, including case studies. The concern addressed in this chapter is that incorrect message design leads to inaccurate enactment of emergency response.

Using a familiar line from Shakespeare, Palmlund describes a narrative approach to risk communication that takes the view that “all the world’s a stage” and humans think and act according to narratives. Chapter 9 addresses the challenge of how risk communicators can use narrative as the design motif for risk messages that connect with the views of the world adopted and enacted by the players, individual citizens as well as others, including emergency managers, for instance. She addresses quandaries from citizens’ points of view: What should I know to reduce uncertainty that is inherent to the nature of risk? How should I act, individually and in concert with others in the face of that uncertainty? Various narratives not only define and evaluate risks as variously acceptable, but also consist of a cast of characters including the risk creators/generators, researchers, bearers, risk bearers’ advocates, informers, and arbiters. The various narratives that exist throughout society assess risks and offer responses to them. Such taxonomy helps understand the risk messages and the logics that flow from them that define the relationships between individuals in society and their responses to the risks they encounter.

Risk and crisis communication necessarily have a basis in presentation and discussion of fact. In various ways risk, especially, relies on sound science however daunting that challenge is. Chapter 10 looks at this paradox from the point of view of the myths that become part of risk messages, and reactions to them. Recognizing the need for messages that contain accurate information as the basis for competent communication, Anderson and Spitzberg offer an insightful examination of how discourse can fall short of its need to be fact based. Myths cloud the accuracy of many messages and therefore lead away from sound communication in the face of disasters. As a partial antidote for this problem, they offer message design suggestions that if applied can help community members respond more appropriately in response to disasters, crises, and risks.

Continuing the discussion started in chapter 3, Aldoory focuses on the perilous assumption that facts are neutral and free from interpretative frames that may result in quite different interpretations of the same information. Chapter 11 looks at the matter of messages through the frame of social constructionism and key constructs relevant to its challenges. Various cultures bring into risk and crisis communication unique, idiosyncratic sets of interpretive heuristics. Traditional questions raised in risk communication have included how safe is safe, and what are the facts and do we have them straight. Aldoory reminds us that risk communicators also need to ask, what interpretative frames are at work in each community at risk.

Examining what happens to messages once they get into the media, Ryan analyzes the paradox of science as reported and interpreted. However sound the science might be that defines risks and leads to policy recommendations, the reality as constructed depends on how well that discussion survives in public conversation. Media, politicians, and activists play a role in framing messages which are necessarily variations on the theme created by science, which itself may be corrupted by the motives of key players in a risk controversy. Uncertainty is a defining characteristic of risk; key discussants may magnify rather than reduce the amount of uncertainty on some matter more as a political move than a more altruistic effort to put the best science into play to serve risk bearers. In chapter 12, Ryan demonstrates how such distortions can paralyze risk discussion. Scientific literacy and journalism are exploited to the advantage of some discussants.

Discussion of message factors continues in chapter 13 which looks broadly at rhetorical, persuasion, and information theories to help explain how messages are shaped into discourse and how discourse shapes messages. We often hear or read the comment that effective risk communication and crisis response involve open reporting of information, a sort of information sharing model. Section Two, rather, stresses the dynamics at work as facts are put into play. In this chapter, Springston, Avery, and Sallot explain the reality that discourse is designed to influence opinion and action; it is propositional. Thus, as much as risk communication experts would like an informed consent model of risk communication and crisis response they realize that discourse is tailored to be competitively influential. Influence theories feature the molar concepts of knowledge, attitude, and behavior (KAB) as a logic of influence. To understand and enact socially responsible risk communication, practitioners and academics must understand the ways in which people interpret and respond to the dangers in their lives and the messages that discuss those dangers.

Fear and denial not only confound the efficacy of risk communication but offer opportunities for effective message design leading targets of such messages to experience efficacy: Self, expert, and community. This combination of constructs, chapter 14 reasons, offer opportunities to tailor messages in ways that increase their chances for improving individual and public health. This line of argument features the Extended Parallel Process Model as developed by Witte and featured by her colleagues Roberto and White. Uncertainty can manifest itself as fear or dread. In large part which route that takes in the thoughts and decisions of individuals depends on the kinds and degrees of efficacy that can frame it as a manageable response rather than denial.

As risks are manifested into crisis, organizations are expected to respond. Crisis scholars have featured crisis management as consisting of three phases: pre-crisis, crisis, and post-crisis. Chapter 15 features the post-crisis stage as consisting of the need for renewal. Ulmer, Sellnow, and Seeger examine the message challenges that result as crisis communicators work to achieve a new level, perhaps including restoration of the reputation of the organization which suffered the crisis. As much as a crisis poses threats to managements, it can offer an opportunity. Both by improvements achieved through its strategic business plan and by enhanced communication efforts, organizations can not only put a crisis behind them but also emerge from trying times on the prospect of an even better future, an enhanced legitimacy to operate.

Risk communication, as does crisis response, both have a public and private face. Chapter 16 offers insights into the back story, the private aspects of risk analysis and response that influence how the message will be created and put into play. Shifting the focus from public display to organizational practice, Chess and Johnson build from the mental models approach, the desire to get the data right, as the foundation for effective external communication. Power and reflective management are important aspects of ethical risk management. No message is better than the quality of organization that promotes it into the risk dialogue. This is not only a matter of the challenge of organizational legitimacy, but also of the community where the dialogue transpires.

Implied in many of the chapters of this volume, ethical judgment is as important as is sound science. Taking a systems approach to the examination of the relationship between organizations and their publics, chapter 17 gives Bowen the opportunity to examine the ethical implications of risk communication in conjunction with issues management. The essential theme is that ethical challenges arise from the consequences risk assessment and management, as well as communication, have on those affected by the risks, the risk bearers. Those responsible to other members of the community for their role in the creation and mitigation of risk, Bowen reasons, are obligated to engage in discourse that brings parties together in meaningful ways for the betterment of society.

Such challenges take on local and global proportions because risks within communities may cross national boundaries. Through various levels of colonialism, one political economy can create risks for members of other political economies. Messages need, then, to emerge from dialogue rather than merely emanate from some ostensibly credible source. Chapter 18 discusses the challenges of public participation and decision making. McComas, Arvai, and Besley summarize and advance the discussion of public participation, long a principle of risk democracy. Those who h...