Wes Jamison PUR 6934 Reaction blog #1 Lundgren and McMakin chapters 4 & 6

The readings were practical and applied, if somewhat pedestrian. The authors identify various risk venues and scenarios, and provide a compilation of the literature, and in so doing present a “cookbook” of pragmatism for the practitioner. Whether in the form of constraints such as inadequate resources, management "push back," role confusion, procedural hurdles, or other internal or external constraints, chapter 4 is valuable in stating the obvious: any practitioner can empathize with the authors’ discussion of constraining variables related to risk communication, and the value of chapter 4 lies in its articulation of what might otherwise be mere intuitive, anecdotal, and esoteric knowledge limited to professional expertise but rarely stated. Similarly, chapter 6 takes the obvious aspects of practitioner experience and articulates their components, and the authors lay out their gambit: risk communication entails knowing your audience and knowing your situation. Nonetheless, risk and its communication is more complex and confounding than the authors make it appear, and several practical and theoretical issues emerge from the readings.
Interestingly, the authors note on pp. 56-57 that personnel constraints are real and potentially serious, but the three emotional constraints they list involve limits on rational choice rather than other social psychological affects. Obviously the authors implicitly support rational choice and social exchange theory, but nevertheless they overlook a potentially devastating consequence of risk communication: what are the negative psychological consequences on the communicators who must constantly deal with real and perceived risks, such as increased personal anxiety, cynicism, and trivialization of real risk? If individuals underestimate risks that are familiar, what is the impact of constant risk communications exposure upon communicators’ perceptions of risks? Social Psychologist Sherry Latinga has noted that proximity to potentially anxiety-ridden and risky situations can cause risk invisibility.
Likewise, one of the constraints includes uncooperative management, thus membership in, or influence upon, the dominant coalition is critical for effective management of risks and communication thereof. Yet, the authors provide little insight as to techniques for ingratiation of risk communicators into the dominant coalition, and alternative communication strategies for the "excluded" risk communicator is lacking. Similarly, the authors note that management may be reticent to provide information. This is no surprise, since information is a source of power in organizational settings, and organizational sociologists tell us that stewardship of information and “information frugality” is often seen as a critical component of management power. And the authors posit that practitioner inability or unwillingness to see differing value systems is a constraint---this argument has profound implications. Peter Berger posits in “The Homeless Mind” that individuals who are constantly bombarded with alternative value systems can experience “cognitive homelessness” and subsequent anomie if they cannot exclude those value systems from their frame of reference. In other words, all value systems are not equal, and the very act of recognition and understanding undermines the heuristics, schemas, and cognitive shortcuts that provide meaning and grounding.
While the authors do an admirable job of listing constraints, they fail to discuss them in any depth. For instance, on pp. 67 they discuss stigmatization and efforts to reduce it without discussing the very real and beneficial social functions of stigmatization in various contexts or the self-conscious efforts of competing political actors and rhetors to use social stigmas for political gain. Their discussion, albeit limited to practical discussions for pragmatic practitioners, could have used a discussion of the broader context and implications of their recommendations.
Chapter 6 was similar in that it provided useful “how-to” guidelines and a ready reference standard, without providing deeper context or implications. Most interesting is their presentation of Covello’s matrix of risk response as well as the importance of social trust in institutions. Covello provides a very useful matrix for testing various research frames, and the variables proved accurate and predictive in a research project I did in Europe. The work done in Europe on trust indicates that one effect of post-modernism and post-structuralism, e.g. the disintegration of traditional social structures and communities of meaning and their reintegration into reified communities of “people like me”, has profound implications for risk communication. Indeed, counter-intuitively, the Eurobarometer biannual survey of EU public opinion indicates that increased scientific knowledge of abstract risks actually increases opposition to the risk, and it also indicates that trust has declined precipitously in institutions that have traditionally been vested with dissemination of risk information, e.g. government agencies, universities. It also found that people increasingly withdraw from public discussions of risk in favor of seeking explanations in their individuated communities of meaning. This is by way of saying that traditional risk communication models face increasing difficulty in the EU.
Finally, the authors posit a very parsimonious and compact definition of risk communication: know your audience and know your situation. But, given the advent of new media and their impact on communications and the ability of publics to align and realign in a limitless array of ideologies, perceptions, and opinions, what exactly constitutes a “public” these days? Was the individual blogger who precipitated a crisis for the Krypto-lock manufacturer a “public?” If so, how can any practitioner know the almost limitless and shifting publics within her domain? Who is a “stakeholder”, given the new media and the fragmentation of communication channels, and how can a company possibly engage in effective environmental scanning when its environment is typified by perpetual and complex mutation? These are questions that the authors neglect to discuss, and although the text may be effective as a manual, a “recipe book” of best management practices, if the devil is in the details, or rather the contingencies, then chapters 4 and 6 lack the needed depth and context.