New Media in Times of Crisis

Keri K. Stephens, Keri K. Stephens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351336307
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

New Media in Times of Crisis provides an interdisciplinary look at research focused around how people organize during crises.

Contributors examine the latest practices for communicating during crises, including evacuation practices, workplace safety challenges, crisis social media usage, and strategies for making emergency alerts on U.S. mobile phones constructive and helpful. The book is grounded in the practices of first responders, crisis communicators, people experiencing tragic events, and communities who organize on- and offline to make sense of their experiences. The authors draw upon a wide range of theories and frameworks with the goal of establishing new directions for research and practice.

The text is suitable for advanced students and researchers in crisis, disaster, and emergency communication.

SECTION II

How Individuals Seek, Share, and Get Messages

Section II of this book focuses on individuals’ actions and how they seek, share, and receive crisis messages. This section begins with a focus on risk-information seeking around safety information at work. Here, Ford discusses the foundational concept of uncertainty and how many of safety messages sent and received revolve around managing uncertainty. Next, Cacciatore, Kim, and Danzy examine another common reality for organizations: when their reputations are threatened by crises played out through public social media platforms. These scholars examine two different crises experienced by United Airlines, and their social-listening analysis shows how the public’s sentiment changed and fueled the crisis.

While discussions on new media are spread throughout this book, this section examines a form of new media that is being used to push or send messages. The photo in Figure 0.3 is a screenshot of a wireless emergency alert (WEA) message the first time a U.S. president sent this type of message to the public.

In Chapter 6, Bean and Madden discuss these WEAs, and the efforts being made to help them become productive emergency message platforms. This section ends with a comprehensive review of literature on evacuations, a common reason that WEAs may be sent in the future. Transportation and civil engineers Rambha, Jafari, and Boyles, share literature on transportation, traffic, shelters, and the various computer models and simulations used to predict human behaviors.

FIGURE 0.3 Screenshot of a WEA broadcast in the U.S. in 2018

4

IDENTIFYING COMMUNICATIVE PROCESSES INFLUENCING RISK-INFORMATION SEEKING AT WORK

A Research Agenda

Jessica L. Ford

“The best high reliability organizations know that they have not experienced all of the ways that their system can fail” (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007, p. 3). High-reliability organizations are harbingers of daunting demands, risks, and accidents, which sets them apart from other types of organizations (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007). It is no surprise then, that construction workers, firefighters, miners, and oil workers regularly incur the highest number of on-the-job injuries and fatalities (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2016). Recognizing that workplace injuries and fatalities are indications that there has been a “failure” in organizational communication (Real, 2008), it is surprising that research on this topic is scant (see Real, 2008, 2010; Zoller, 2003 for notable exceptions). In fact, Barling, Loughlin, and Kelloway (2002, p. 488) note, “less than 1% of organizational research published in top journals has focused on occupational safety, a situation that has not changed for two decades.” Considering that 2.9 million nonfatal occupational injuries occurred in 2016 alone (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2017), it is shocking that such little fervor for research on occupational health and safety exists within organizational communication scholarship.

Because workplace injuries affect health, but happen at work, approaching this topic requires interdisciplinary contributions. In the only other appeal for communication research on this subject, Real (2010) recognizes the value of interdisciplinary work, calling specifically for “health-related organizational communication” research (p. 457). This chapter further develops Real’s (2010) call for interdisciplinary research on occupational safety by presenting a cursory review of organizational, crisis, and health communication scholarship on information seeking. All three domains of research help identify different communicative aspects of information seeking, which I then use to create a research agenda on employee risk-information seeking. For instance, while organizational communication research on information seeking focuses primarily on socialization, performance evaluations, and organizational change (see Morrison, 2002 for a review), the present research highlights the need to study these three areas as communicatively constructed processes that enhance our understanding of risk-information seeking. Thus, learning from other approaches to information seeking enriches future studies on risk-information seeking in the workplace. Seeing as communication research on risk-information seeking helps pinpoint possible obstructions to workplace safety, this area of research demands more attention.

There are, however, exceptions to this general pattern of oversight for organizational risk-related research. Zoller (2003) shows how discursive practices in the workplace foster employee consent to health hazards and silence injured employees. Often, employees do not report work-related injuries because of tensions between occupational identity, organizational norms, and regulatory organizational structures (Zoller, 2003). Scott and Trethewey’s (2008) examination of firefighters also uses a discursive approach to risk navigation at work, finding that occupational identity constrains risk management practices. Despite physical hazards at work, these firefighters relied on group-level discourse, rather than regulatory processes to substantiate risk (Scott & Trethewey, 2008). Real (2008) also contributes to this literature by demonstrating that responses to workplace risks are a function of an individual’s safety and efficacy beliefs, and later calls for more communication research on occupational safety (Real, 2010).

These examples of communication research on occupational risk do not represent a disciplinary trend, nor do they completely uncover the communicative processes influencing risk-information seeking. Although there are journals devoted to safety research (e.g., Safety Science, Journal of Safety Research, Accident Analysis and Prevention), these outlets focus on the antecedents for safety compliance rather than the communicative processes influencing risk-information seeking (see Cooper & Phillips, 2004; Paul & Maiti, 2007; Vredenburgh, 2002). Research on safety and risk does, however, highlight safety culture as a significant predictor of safety behaviors (Cooper & Phillips, 2004; DeJoy, 2005; Fernández-Muñiz, Montes-Peón, & Vázquez-Ordás, 2007; Vinodkumar & Bhasi, 2009). Because communication research is ideally suited to study aspects of organizational culture, such as safety culture, I see these findings as a reference point for future research from communication scholars on risk-information seeking at work. Although I acknowledge the value safety research contributes to our understanding of workplace behaviors, I petition for more attention to be paid to the communicative mechanisms driving risk-information seeking, rather than compliance. Thus, this chapter uses communication literature on information seeking to create a research agenda for future organizational communication scholarship.

In the sections that follow, I first explain why research on occupational risk-information seeking necessitates an uncertainty management perspective. Subsequently, I review organizational communication literature on information seeking, noting how each area of research in this field points to a set of important contexts and communicative dynamics for future studies on risk-information seeking. Next, I review crisis and health communication research on information seeking, since these domains embody aspects of organizational life within industries characterized by risks and hazards. As such, I adopt and extend the findings from crisis and health communication research on information seeking to build a research agenda on employee risk-information seeking. Finally, I summarize the lessons organizational, crisis, and health communication literature imparts on future risk-information seeking scholarship.

Risk-Information Seeking as Uncertainty Management

Uncertainty is perhaps the most common experience among organizational workers. Morrison (2002, p. 229) states “organizations are institutions characterized by ambiguity, change, and uncertainty.” These three features drive information-seeking behaviors, but none spur more research than uncertainty. Literature on uncertainty management within organizational communication covers a range of topics from socialization (Kramer, 2010; Kramer, Dougherty, & Pierce, 2004) and performance evaluations (Ashford & Cummings, 1983), to workplace relationships (Kassing, 2000) and organizational change (Lewis, 1999). Yet, one aspect is clear throughout this research: information seeking is central to the management of uncertainty (Morrison, 2002).

Uncertainty exists when an individual perceives information to be unavailable, inaccessible or inconsistent (Brashers, 2001). Whereas previous scholarship promotes uncertainty reduction as the compulsory response to uncertainty (Berger & Calabrese, 1975), more recent research recognizes that uncertainty reduction is only one of numerous responses to situations where information is lacking (Brashers, 2001). In addition, uncertainty reduction may not be possible in all situations, thus increasing the need for an alternative perspective. To better explain all behavior under uncertain organizational circumstances, I use uncertainty management theory as a guiding lens for research on employee risk-information seeking (Brashers, 2001).

Brashers best describes the scope of uncertainty management when he states, “Communication in uncertainty management follows from appraisals and emotional responses; it encompasses managing uncertainty that is challenging; managing uncertainty that is essential for maintaining hope, learning to live with chronic uncertainty, and managing information problems” (Brashers, 2001, p. 482). Considering that each of the situations Brashers describes is present for employees who work in the midst of hazards (e.g., firefighters, construction workers, miners), it is appropriate to use uncertainty management as the guiding theoretical framework for future research in this area. The strength of uncertainty management theory is that it allows researchers to consider the multilayered complexity between risk assessment and information seeking. Since information influences the assessment of risks in the workplace (Griffin, Neuwirth, Dunwoody, & Giese, 2004), researchers need to consider how personal, relational, and contextual features challenge uncertainty management.

Uncertainty management theory is a dominant framework in organizational, crisis, and health research because it brings attention to the experience of uncertainty and the creation of meaning in a variety of contexts. Since the present research on risk-information seeking contains organizational, crisis, and health-related aspects, Brashers (2001) uncertainty management theory aptly frames this research agenda. The following sections review the literature on information seeking from these three areas of communication research noting how each body of work helps to direct future inquiry on the communicative processes influencing employee risk-information seeking.

An Interdisciplinary Approach to Risk-Information Seeking Research

Reviewing the literature on risk-information seeking alone only provides a narrow glimpse into the communicative processes influencing this behavior. A broader consideration of information seeking, however, exposes the value of adopting and extending other research approaches to study employee risk-information seeking. Specifically, organizational communication research on information seeking highlights socialization, performance appraisals, and organizational change as important communicative processes for future studies on risk-information seeking to consider (e.g., Kramer et al., 2004; Morrison, 2002; Myers et al., 2015). Crisis communication research on information seeking points future research on employee risk-information seeking to consider how individuals select sources of information and discursively construct risk resilience (Chewning, Lai, & Doerfel, 2013; Stephens, Barrett, & Mahometa, 2013). And health communication research reminds us of the role social comparisons play in predicting risk-information seeking (Bigman, 2014). In the following sections, I use the present literature on information seeking from organizational, crisis, and health communication scholars to create a research agenda on employee risk-information seeking.

Organizational Information Seeking

Employees face numerous situations where information seeking is an appropriate response to uncertainty. Job interviews, newcomer interactions, task-related procedures, change management, and performance appraisals all induce uncertainty for employees (Morrison, 2002). Although navigating risks at work also causes uncertainty, organizational communication research examining risk and health information seeking is scant (see Real, 2010; Zoller 2003 for notable exceptions). Instead, the majority of research on information seeking by organizational scholars looks at socialization, performance feedback, and change implementation (Morrison, 2002). Yet, each of these three areas helps direct future scholarship on risk-information seeking.

Socialization

Socialization refers to the process of joining and assimilating into an organization (see Kramer & Miller, 2014 for a review). Communication during socialization structures newcomers’ behaviors and their identity at work (Poole, 2011), which is i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Section I Focusing on Crisis Responders
• Section II How Individuals Seek, Share, and Get Messages
• Section III Opportunities for New Forms of Organizing during Times of Crisis
• About the Editor and Authors
• Index