Homeland Security Cultures

Enhancing Values While Fostering Resilience

Alexander Siedschlag, Andrea Jerkovic, Alexander Siedschlag, Andrea Jerkovic

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781786605917
• eBook ISBN: 9781786605931
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Homeland Security Cultures: Enhancing Values While Fostering Resilience explores the role that culture plays in the study and practice of homeland security in an all-hazards, whole-community, and all-of-government scope. It does so by analyzing and discussing strategic, organizational, operational, and social cultures in the U.S. Homeland Security Enterprise, as well as from an international perspective. The focus is on how knowledge and interpretation, normative values, common symbols, and/or action repertories inform the evolution of the homeland security mission space and the accomplishment of homeland security functions. Contributions also address institutional changes designed to foster a more coherent common homeland security culture.

This textbook will make a contribution to the evolution of homeland security as a policy area and a field of study by offering actionable insight as well as critical thinking from scholars and practitioners on how cultural aspects matter in balancing security against liberty, in managing complex risks, in enhancing collaboration across sectors, and in explaining how a resilient nation can be fostered while enhancing liberal and democratic values.

Chapter 1

Security Cultures in Action: Introduction and Overview of Chapters

Alexander Siedschlag

Reinforced by the National Security Strategy of 2017, America’s goal has been to foster a resilient nation through the creation of a “culture of preparedness” since the National Strategy for Homeland Security of 2007.¹ The central role of culture in homeland security is sometimes obscured by oblique semantics of official documents, and it is not adequately reflected in homeland security studies. This book addresses those shortcomings by analyzing strategic, organizational, operational, civic, and societal cultures in the U.S. Homeland Security Enterprise (HSE), as well as in selected international perspective. The Homeland Security Enterprise being defined as “the Federal, State, local, tribal, territorial, nongovernmental, and private-sector entities, as well as individuals, families, and communities who share a common national interest in the safety and security of America and the American population,”² it is evident that the study and practice of it cannot be complete or comprehensive without covering culture-related aspects.

Applying a multidisciplinary approach, this volume studies security cultures as multifaceted empirical phenomena, not in the normative perspective of prescribing a particular “good” homeland security culture. Culture is not a coherent or obvious collective fabric that achieves political, social, and organizational integration. Rather, it is of “fragmented, multiple and contested nature” and often embodied in tacit knowledge, shared cognition, and discursive practice that do not make it evident or trivial to observe.³ The analytical concept of culture refers not to a certain end state but to peoples’ assumptions about the world.⁴ Culture can be understood as the sum of cognitive forms by which members of social communities make sense of reality, attribute meaning to facts, as well as save and reproduce knowledge and their interpretation of the world.⁵ Culture thus describes “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.”⁶ In addition, culture reduces complexity not only in perception but also in decision-making, constraining the factual choice of options based on norms and values guiding assessments and expectations.⁷

The general assumption of cultural approaches to security is that security postures depend on culturally embedded meanings of risk and socially negotiated sensemaking of security threats and challenges.⁸ Formation of policy preferences but also of public opinion about risks and their management is not necessarily the result of realism; it is the outcome of a certain construction of reality within cultural contexts.⁹ For example, immigrant cultures may be interpreted as the cause of social radicalization processes that mount up to threats to internal security.

Providing the background for (re)cognition or construction of problems, culture also defines at what point society will accept a problem (such as a security threat) as solved.¹⁰ At the same time, there are and will always be different cultural views of “the” problem. Thus, for example, differing perspectives on what is at stake in the immigration debate or continuing problems in coherently implementing national planning frameworks across tiers of government, states, and jurisdictions are not an indication of lack of proper security culture(s). In fact, “to the extent that culture is widely shared, scholars recognize this as an outcome to be explained rather than a state of affairs to be assumed.”¹¹

Moreover, research has shown that culture is not a factor that directly affects action or outcomes; rather, “culture defines the range of acceptable possible alternatives from which groups or individuals may, other circumstances permitting, choose a course of action.”¹² Culture furnishes a set of “orienting dispositions” guiding peoples’ perception and cognitive response to complex situations.¹³ Therefore, cultural factors have no intrinsic normative value: They may foster realistic or misguided threat assessment and exert positive or negative effects on accomplishing homeland security missions and reaching homeland security objectives.

However, this book assumes that more coherent (across domains) and consistent (over time) consideration of culture will help improve the study as well as the practice of homeland security. One main reason for this is that culture, understood as an independent variable, can explain “differences between collectivities on certain dependent variables.”¹⁴ Cultural explanations add most value whenever differences in orientation and behavior cannot be sufficiently accounted for by structural and institutional factors, such as legal frameworks, organizational contexts, or policies and strategies in place.¹⁵ The task is to identify the actual empirical impact of culture on different policy areas,¹⁶ or contexts of security. By analyzing cultural aspects in homeland security mission domains, cross-sector collaboration, and the whole-community dimension, this book contributes to establishing a sound foundation for more consistent and coherent study and assessment of homeland security cultures, serving scholastic as well as practical purposes.

The following sections will detail the benefit of cultural analysis of homeland security, review how culture has been addressed in homeland security practice (policy and strategy), discuss the state of the art of scholastic analysis of security cultures, present the approach and analytical model used in this book, as well as offer an overview of its chapters.

CULTURE AND HOMELAND SECURITY

Representing a multidisciplinary account of multifaceted cultural aspects in homeland security, this book’s chapters do not use a streamlined concept of culture. Nonetheless, the book applies an overarching, concept-proofed model of security culture as frame of reference and to integrate findings from the different contributions.¹⁷ Within this model, the book’s focus is on how the main components of security cultures (to be detailed below)—knowledge and interpretation, normative values, common symbols, and/or action repertories—inform the carrying out of homeland security core missions as well as the evolution of the mission space. Contributions also address institutional change to foster more coherent common homeland security organizational and operational cultures.

The September 11, 2001, attacks and the response to them did not change the constitution or the political system of the United States and did not recreate its people or way of life. In particular, from the culture point of view, 9/11 was less a “game changer”¹⁸ than a catalyst. However, the mainstream of homeland security policy and the study of it have been based on a largely arbitrary “temporal narrative” that established 9/11 as a watershed, just overwriting any national and civil security–related experience, knowledge, and practices that existed before.¹⁹ In practice, furthermore, cultural aspects are often identified as “issues” that have a negative impact on the effectiveness of homeland security (although, as noted in the beginning, one of its main goals is to achieve a resilient nation by fostering a national culture of preparedness). For example, agency cultures are blamed for shortcomings in information sharing, or organizational subcultures are said to harm the efficiency and effectiveness of the national security process and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).²⁰

Such understanding of culture is inadequate, since over 100 years of research have demonstrated that culture is the fabric of social interaction and does not hamper organizations in performing to their mission but nourishes political institutions “through a process of consensual validation.”²¹ Whenever cooperation and collaborative problem-solving in the Homeland Security Enterprise fail, it is not because of cultural issues but because of its insufficient institutionalization, with action patterns and normative expectations not properly internalized by the diverse homeland security community, for whatever reason.

If homeland security can be functionally defined in one sentence, it is distributed (whole-community based) risk management in a dynamic all-hazards context that defines its evolving mission space. This does not mean that the objective of homeland security is to address all and any hazards that might emerge. Policies and strategies in the United States and elsewhere have pointed out that in order to be effective (and affordable), homeland security needs to be selective, focusing on “the greatest risks” to security,²² or on those that are responsive to available strategies and technological tools.²³ Definition of, and response to, risk is not only evidence-based but also culturally driven.²⁴ It does not serve the purpose of homeland security to impose a normative (“good”) culture on a diverse and widely distributed enterprise. The purpose of the study of cultural aspects of homeland security should be to enhance a society’s commonly acquired values, while fostering resilience and a culture of preparedness.

At the same time, the study of homeland security cultures should not be apologetic. Among other things, it should address how security needs to be balanced with other values, such as liberty and freedom as well as accountability and open discussion. As a cultural perspective on homeland security underscores, critical thinking and continuous improvement are not signs of weakness, but a natural part of the effort and ingredients of success.²⁵ Lack of critical thinking in homeland security can lead not only to self-serving policies, but also to loss of public trust and to mass casualties.²⁶

The security culture perspective helps understand how a resilient nation can be fostered while enhancing democratic values. With the requisite variety of homeland security planning and practice constantly growing, it is essential to determine the line where response to threats can infringe what a nation and its people strive to defend. The liberty versus security debate is one example.²⁷ The so-called NSA Report (Liberty and Security in a Changing World: Report and Recommendations of The President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, 2013), mandated by President Obama as a response to the Snowden case (revealing of details of U.S. government surveillance programs by leaking classified information from the National Security Agency [NSA]), pointed out how homeland security must be embedded into democratic culture:

Protecting the Right to Privacy. The right to privacy is essential to a free and self-governing society. The rise of modern technologies makes it all the more important that democratic nations respect people’s fundamental right to privacy, which is a defining part of individual security and personal liberty.

Protecting Democracy, Civil Liberties, and the Rule of Law...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Security Cultures in Action: Introduction and Overview of Chapters
• Part I: Domain Aspects
• Part II: Collaboration Aspects
• Part III: Societal Security Aspects
• Conclusion and Outlook
• Bibliography
• Homeland Security Cultures Research Guide
• List of Contributors
• Index