It all depends

The Grunig Situational Theory of Publics: in essence, the Grunigs take an aecdotal and common sense observation and support it---there is no 'one' single public, no general public, but instead there are different publics with different levels of involvement and risk awareness. With this is mind, and in keeping with the co-orientation elements of their excellence theory, Grunig argues that risk messages should be constructed according to the context of stakeholder groups. This seemes true enough, but as we argued in class, who exactly are those publics? Indeed, with the advent of new media and the disintegration of traditional communities of meaning and their realignment in increasingly transient coalition, the post-modern perspective may be more accurate.

That is to say, post-modern and post-structural critics would attack Grunig as not only out-of-touch but antiquated. Peter Berger would argue that modernity and post-modernity have fragmented meaning into an infinite array of individuated and amorphous plausibility structures, and the text "The Functions of Social Protest" would tell us that one result of modernity is that protest and activism serve as focii of collective meanings, e.g. people protest because it gives them a sense of belonging to a greater group as well as a sense of purpose. The implications of this for risk communication and for crisis communication are profound, because if indeed we live in Beck's Risk Society then any attempt to implement two-way symmetric PR is doomed to fail.

Instead, I have come to see that crisis communications may be more about managing rumors and the crises that arise within the crises, as well as pitting groups of rhetors against each other (divide et impera) in a classic political strategy of preserving the status quo ante. Yes, clearly there are techniques that "work" to address elements of crisis cycles, and yes, there are other techniques that may work to help people deal with crises. But technique without philosophy provides little guidance at all.