The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic will inevitably lead to questions that arise after all major emergencies: who is at fault? What could we have done differently? Why did this happen? Before 2020, widespread contagious disease in the United States felt like a past memory due to the advent of modern medicine. Yet, all levels of US society have experienced fallout from COVID-19, and multiple organizations have had to respond and coordinate their activities. Consider hospitals, long-term care centers, local, state, and national governments, international organizations, and nonprofits. These organizations have worked together successfully to facilitate care, policymaking, supply procurement, and human aid at unprecedented levels. Conversely, high-profile failures during the response included a competition among levels of the US government for masks and ventilators, with President Donald Trump at one point telling states that they should not expect federal aid and supplies (Martin, 2020). Public messaging campaigns exposed organizational disagreements, with the US Center for Disease Control and World Health Organization at one point disagreeing about the efficacy of face masks (Schumaker, 2020). US testing efforts were stymied by lack of cooperation between the Food and Drug Administration and pharmaceutical companiesāa problem that could have been overcome by developing a network of testing across hospitals, if such a network had existed (Yong, 2020). As Ed Yong (2020) wrote in The Atlantic, āa pandemic demands the coordinated efforts of dozens of agencies.ā The COVID-19 pandemic points to the way widespread societal problems require widespread organizational involvement, but this involvement does not guarantee success.
While COVID-19 may have felt unimaginable in scope and devastation to the public, public health professionals have for years urged preparation for a pandemic on this scale. āAn influenza pandemic is inevitable,ā public health experts have warned, āa pandemic strain of influenza is likely to appear suddenly, without advanced warning, and it is unlikely that a vaccine will be developed quickly enough to stop itā (Cinti, 2005, p. 61). āThe possibility of an influenza pandemic occurring within the next two decades is very real,ā experts presciently argued in 2009 (French & Raymond, 2009). Despite these appeals for urgent action, US emergency preparedness funds have consistently focused elsewhere on threats like terrorism and increasingly destructive natural disasters (Brill, 2016; Weber et al., 2020). When COVID-19 hit the United States in the spring of 2020, a myriad of errors pointed to the ways the country could have prepared for a pandemic on a national scale but did not: a project to build more ventilators had been abandoned in the late 2000s (Kulish et al., 2020). The Strategic National Stockpile, a set of warehouses filled with medical supplies to respond to bioterror, pandemic, and natural disaster health needs, was quickly depleted (Greenfieldboyce, 2020). President Trump decreased the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) budget in a way that removed key staff members from China who could have assisted with the early COVID-19 response (Taylor, 2020). The 2020 pandemic points to a wicked problem in community preparedness: that there will always be too many threats and seemingly a scarcity of resources to respond to them. Still, many news sources wondered why the United States had not prepared for a massive public health threat despite numerous expert warnings. The pandemic then also raises the question: who identifies threats to our communities and our world?
From a communication perspective, the failure to act appropriately toward the threat of pandemic invites us to look to persuasive attempts and appeals: who spoke about the threat of a pandemic, and how? From a risk and crisis communication perspective, we know that the likelihood of a threat alone does not explain how we perceive it: risk framing is a deeply communicative problem that is informed by cultural perceptions of risk as much as the actual probability of the risk occurring (Beck, 1992). But from an organizational communication perspective, we can also consider the ways that identifying and preparing for risks is even more complex and informed by a variety of groups, stakeholders, and people. In particular, I propose that we consider how challenging situations like emergency preparedness require collaboration among organizations, but using an organizational communication lens, we can see how a central issue in these situations is that of interorganizational authority. Given the scope of potential threats our communities can face, collaboration among organizations is essential, as stakeholders ranging from first responder organizations to volunteer and nonprofit groups to local and national government agencies offer perspectives, expertise, and resources to manage these risks. The question of what threats to prepare for is also a question of who should prepare for these threats and how certain organizations come to control the problem framing around emergencies.
This book takes as its starting point that interorganizational collaboration is an often-posed solution to widespread societal problems (including, but not limited to, crisis situations), but without the establishment of authority, collaborations fail. The book uses emergency management collaborations as a case study of the various bids for authority that occur in collaborations. Interorganizational collaboration has become a serious object of study within the subfield of organizational communication, bringing recognition to collaboration as a unique organizational form that brings together multiple organizations. Collaborations must transcend boundaries to help members become a āweā that sees itself as having shared goals that can address a shared problem (Lewis et al., 2010). Collaboration can appear as an appealing solution to big issues that spillover the boundaries of any one organization's capabilities. As a result, scholars have looked at collaborations that address issues from natural resource use (Cooren, 2001), to substance abuse (Hoelscher et al., 2017), and urban planning initiatives (Woo & Leonardi, 2018), to name a few of the many problem areas where collaboration has appeal.
Despite this promise, scholars have warned that simply getting organizations together is insufficient to create a good collaborative outcome (Koschmann & Burk, 2016). This is why collaborative authority is the central concept of this book. For collaboration to create solutions, the organizations involved must establish a shared understanding of the purpose, preferred courses of action, and problem they face. While these issues seem far-reaching, at the center of them all is the challenge of interorganizational authority. Existing understandings of authority and collaboration have assumed that collaborations must create authority, often where there is seemingly none. As organizations enter into collaboration, no one organization has been placed in a position of power over the others, so questions of collaborative authority tend to focus on the establishment of structures for decision-making and accountability (Gray & Purdy, 2018). Authority in collaboration tends to be framed in terms of power differences that can be addressed in communication processesāin other words, if collaboration members discuss their priorities and goals together, they can come to a shared understanding of what the collaboration should do and who should be in charge (e.g., Gray & Purdy, 2018; Huxham & Vangen, 2005). Scholars suggest using ethical communication practices like dialog to address these power differences (e.g., Heath & Sias, 1999; McKinney & Field, 2008). These studies draw attention to the complicated practices that constitute collaboration, and that authority relations are negotiated throughout the processes.
These are essential steps in any collaboration, and authority can help demonstrate the messy and numerous influences that not only establish collaborations but also maintain collaboration through talk. Organizational communication scholars have already explored what it means to create or have authority in an organization. In particular, scholars have complicated the common idea that authority is vested in those who have been placed āin chargeā (e.g., managers, leaders, and executives). Instead, scholarship drawing on the Communication as Constitutive of Organizations (CCO) perspective considers authority as shifting and dynamically created in interaction (Taylor & Van Every, 2014). In this view, organizational members do not āhaveā authority; instead, they are granted authority when their account of the organization is accepted in interactions with others. When an organizational member speaks to define a situation or recommends a course of action and other members agree, that member has been granted authority to author the organization's trajectory. Further, sources beyond organizational members can be given the authority to influence, as authority is recast as how different agents ācome to matterā in interactions (Benoit-BarnĆ© & Cooren, 2009). Instead of looking at who has authority, this scholarship instead focuses on āauthoritative texts.ā Authoritative texts are seemingly stable meanings that are both created in conversation and guide future conversations once distanced from their original context (Kuhn, 2008; Taylor & Van Every, 2000). In this view, organizations themselves are composed of (and are themselves) authoritative texts, abstractions that stand in for the organization's values, goals, and practices and guide future conversations (Kuhn, 2008). In other words, the CCO view of authority locates the constitution of authority in communicationāboth as interactions, or conversations, and as manifestations of these conversations that serve to organize future conversations, or texts. The move first reframes organizations, not as static, fixed entities, but as constituted by communication and made and remade in ongoing communication. In this view, authority, too, gets reframed, not as the ability to give commands, but as the ability to influence the organization's goals, actions, and identity.
This shift in framing has accompanied the transformation of traditional organizational structures and management styles. As neoliberalism and the gig economy erode stable employment and therefore make organizational membership more precarious, this context also seems to call for more organizational flexibility. The traditional bureaucratic hierarchy (in which those higher in the chain of command have apparent authority over those below them) has given way to more situational authorityāin which the person who has expertise acts with authority, regardless of organizational positionāin team-based and āhorizontalā organizations (Kahn & Kram, 1994). Collaboration is one of the organizational types that is assumed to pair with less traditional bureaucratic, or āvertical,ā sources of authority (Benoit-BarnĆ© & Fox, 2017). CCO scholars have already asserted that when we attempt to conceive of authority as hierarchical or position-based, we fail to account for authority in collaboration, which must instead be created and shared among members as they also let go of authority from their home organizations (Koschmann & Burk, 2016).
While collaborations do often involve horizontal, negotiated authority, this book adds to understandings of collaborative authority by considering how horizontal and vertical authority, stemming from numerous agents, interact in collaboration. At first glance, vertical, hierarchical authority may seem nonexistent, or undesirable, in collaborations. Rather than assume that authority starts from scratch in collaboration, this book asserts that hierarchical authority can and does develop in collaboration. However, even as collaborations establish hierarchies among members, they are influenced by all kinds of authority appeals by members, ranging from years of experience to clashing professional expertise that these members bring to the table.
These findings are based on a two-year ethnographic study of an emergency management collaboration. Emergency management collaborations are, in the United States, often based in local county offices that work across a variety of stakeholders to prepare for and respond to emergencies in their jurisdiction. Anything from natural disasters to human-caused violence can be on the agenda for preparedness, and, as a result, numerous organizations, from police and firefighting to waste management to school districts, have a seat at the table. The clash of different forms of expertise and experience is obvious here, as different knowledge bases interact to frame threats, form community plans, and manage emergency response and recovery. Authority is especially important in crisis response collaborations because they involve people who are used to a very different kind of positioned-based authority in their home organizations. Emergency management collaborations bring together people who are used to working in fairly strict hierarchies and have to collaborate with others who are not in their normal chains of command.
This book adds to the understanding of collaborative authority by accounting for both vertical and horizontal forms of authority, ultimately proposing that authority in collaborations is cumulative. By cumulative authority, I mean that potential sources of authority interact, overlap, and clash in collaborative environments. In the case of the emergency management collaboration, members we...
