Communicating Risk

Jonathan Crichton, Christopher N. Candlin, Arthur S. Firkins, Jonathan Crichton, Christopher N. Candlin, Arthur S. Firkins

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137478788
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

We live in world increasingly shaped by risk, a fact underscored by recent events in the financial markets, science and technology, environmental policy and biosecurity, law enforcement and criminal justice. Risk assessment has become a central concern of governments, organisations and the professions, and the communication of risk is a crucial part of professional work. Exploring how risk is discursively constructed across these domains is therefore central to our understanding of how professional practice affects people's lives. Communicating Risk takes up this challenge, with contributions from leading researchers and practitioners that examine key issues of risk communication across diverse professional domains.

1

Crucial Sites and Research Orientations: Exploring the Communication of Risk

Christopher N. Candlin, Jonathan Crichton, and Arthur S. Firkins

Issues of risk are foundational to people’s lives in contemporary societies, a fact sharply highlighted by the recent history of practices associated with the financial markets, science and technology, workplace health and safety, environmental policy and biosecurity, law enforcement and criminal justice. Exploring such issues is central to our understanding of how professional practice impacts on human relationships in contemporary social life.

Drawing on invited and original contributions from key practitioners and researchers, this book explores how people routinely and across professional domains and sites are discursively engaged in the assessment, management, and communication of risk in ways that materially affect human lives. The book thus recognises that risk, as a major theme in contemporary social and professional life, is both an overarching theoretical construct and one which is constructed in communication among people across diverse sites of practice according their particular expertise and circumstances. It is the argument of the book that if we are to understand the significance of risk in contemporary life, both constructions of risk – the macro and the micro – need to be brought into play, explored, and engaged with each other through a research process that involves interdisciplinary dialogue between professionals, participants, and researchers.

The need for this agenda is pressing. We live in a world described by Beck (1992, 1998, 1999) and by Giddens (1991, 1998) as a ‘risk society’ in which risk is a ‘systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernization itself’ (Beck, 1992, p. 21) and ‘the concept of risk becomes fundamental to the ways that lay actors and technical specialists organize the social world’ (Giddens, 1991, p. 3). The public and private spheres increasingly turn on the management of a portfolio of disparate risks, while the assessment of risk has become a focal activity of government, organisations, and the professions, where the communication of risk occurs as a crucial component of daily work. In essence, as Beck argued, risk is the defining macro construct of the modern age. At the same time, it is increasingly imperative to understand how different ‘societal members’ define, analyse and communicate risk to a range of increasingly diverse audiences, and for what purposes (Horlick-Jones, 2005). That is to say that risk communication has increasingly become a rhetorical activity and the accomplishment of such activity across a wide range of professional fields is fundamentally embedded in discourse and interaction. These include the fields of health (Alaszewski, 2005a, 2005b; Alaszewski & Horlick-Jones, 2003; Hoffman, Linell, Lindh-Astrand, & Kjellgren; Linell, Adelswärd, Sachs, Bredmore, & Lindstedt, 2002; Moore, Candlin, & Plum, 2003), with specific foci such as genetic counselling (Sarangi, Bennert, Howell, & Clarke, 2003; Sarangi & Clarke, 2002; Wood, Prior, & Gray, 2003) and health policy (Bancroft & Wilson, 2007); as well as social work (Firkins & Candlin, 2006, 2011; Hall, Slembrouck, & Sarangi, 2006; Hall & Slembrouck, 2009); international security (Jore & Kain, 2010); and science and technology (Grundmann & Krishnamurthy, 2010; Petersen, 2005).

Despite the emphasis placed by many theorists on the rational and relational nature of risk, what appears to be absent in studies that have sought to define, categorise, and appraise risk, especially within organisations, is a significant focus on how such risk is communicatively and jointly accomplished through interpersonal interaction employing various modalities and across diverse contexts of use. Those studies which have done so have focused on few and single domains and sites, and not explicitly sought the inter-domain and inter-site perspective provided in this collection. Exceptions include journal Special Issues devoted to risk discourse (for example, Candlin & Candlin, 2002; Sarangi & Candlin, 2003b; Zinn, 2010) and a sustained focus in the journal Health, Risk & Society (see, for example, Alaszewski, 2005c; Horlick-Jones, 2003; Sarangi & Candlin, 2003a).

Taking this orientation to risk research, this book brings together macro and micro perspectives on the communication of risk within and across professional domains and, most consequentially for participants, ‘crucial sites’ (Candlin, 2002b) within which:

occur what I have called critical moments, where the communicative competence of the participants is at a premium and at its greatest moment of challenge. This may be due to the heightened significance of the subject matter, for personal, professional, or ideological reasons. These moments may be defined generically across topics and conditions, such as the breaking of bad news, or individually sited within particular conditions in particular contexts, such as the issue of disclosure of sexual and HIV+ status … What then becomes interesting is to map the critical moments on to the crucial sites and to calibrate these against the participant perspectives of those involved. (p. 10)

This focus immediately raises the question of who a site is crucial for and how such critical moments could be identified, described, interpreted and explained within a programme of research that is accountable to participants. For the researcher this raises the question of how to conceptualise the ‘site’ of such research, and – more specifically – what social/theoretical understanding we can bring in doing so, and how we can warrant our answers to this question.

No single methodology will be able to match the demands of such a programme. Rather, it requires the engagement of researcher, practitioner, and participant expertise, brought to bear on the integration of multiple methodologies in seeking to make visible and connect the different perspectives that may be relevant (Candlin, 1997, 2006). Such a ‘multi-perspectival’ approach (Candlin & Crichton, 2011; Crichton, 2010) is not limited to particular theoretical positions or methodologies but open to and able to bring into play multiple theoretical and methodological perspectives on the communication of risk depending on relevant and emergent understandings of the research site under scrutiny. These understandings will depend on collaborative interpretation among researchers and participants, raising what Sarangi has identified as ‘the analyst’s paradox’ (Sarangi, 2007): the problem of how the researcher can align her analysis with the perceptions of participants without either having to become a faux participant or, if not, being irrelevant to their world. Achieving this ‘mutuality of perspective’ (Sarangi & Candlin, 2001) among researchers and participants is a particular challenge because:

For the participants, then, workplace discourse is a process; for the analyst it is inevitably a product, and, so achieving a reciprocity of perspectives is not only a matter of mutualising view and stance, it is also a matter of (re)vitalising what is necessarily an ecology. (Candlin, 2002a, p. 5)

Key to meeting this challenge is an orientation to research that ‘starts with the site’; in other words, that acknowledges from the outset Cicourel’s (1992, 2007) call for ‘ecological validity’:

Validity in the non-experimental social sciences refers to the extent to which complex organisational activities represented by aggregated data from public and private sources and demographic and sample surveys can be linked to the collection, integration and assessment of temporal samples of observable (and when possible recordable) activities in daily life settings. Fragments of discourse materials always are shaped and constrained by the larger organizational settings in which they emerge and simultaneously influenced by cognitive/emotional processes despite the convenience of only focusing on extracted fragments independently of the organizational and cognitive/emotional complexity of daily life settings … the challenge remains how daily life activities simultaneously constrain and shape more complex organizational structures. (1992, p. 736)

Cicourel here underscored the need for sensitivity to the different participant perceptions and ‘interpenetrating contexts’ that localise and situate any particular instance of communication: that is, as he (1992, p. 294) explained:

Verbal interaction is related to the task in hand. Language and other social practices are interdependent. Knowing something about the ethnographic setting, the perception of, and characteristics attributed to, others, and broader and local organisational conditions becomes imperative for an understanding of linguistic and non-linguistic aspects of communicative events.

Acknowledging the institutionally situated, locally accomplished nature of risk communication makes visible as a focus of research sites involving professional communication that is institutionally located. Particularly relevant here is Sarangi and Roberts’ (1999) account of how such sites are characterised by the intersection of both professional and institutional discourses that may be more or less commensurate, serving different or competing purposes, and creating the potential for shifting or realigned constructions of professional, institutional, and personal experience (Roberts & Sarangi, 1999). For example, drawing on ethnographic data Yates (Chapter 7) examines the institutional context of the contemporary policy trajectory in youth justice and the risk research paradigm which underpins it, arguing that the voices of young people provide insight into the complexity of risk in their worlds – a complexity which is easily obfuscated by this risk factor paradigm. In the context of health, O’Grady et al. (Chapter 17) use a combination of discourse analysis and ethnography to highlight the disparate interpretations that patients and doctors might bring to risk calculations by examining the use of software designed to assist general practitioners to engage patients in considering their cardiovascular disease risk. And drawing on critical discourse analysis McKell and De Barro (Chapter 14) reveal how risk activities described in public messages about biosecurity negotiate, and make trade-offs between, institutional, professional and personal knowledge and responsibility.

Together the chapters in the book elaborate, and the book as whole models, this inter-domain and inter-site ‘mapping’ of crucial sites explored through the thematic focus on risk. The communication of risk is revealed, not as restricted to particular disciplinary formulations or theoretical orientations, but as inherently and multiply interpretable, depending on the particular locations, participants, professional, institutional and research orientations and modes of collaboration between and among participants, and between them and researchers. From this inter-domain and inter-site perspective it becomes clear that risk is not simply concerned with the identification of ‘hazards’, in its negative projection and ‘opportunities’ in its positive projection. Risk is also and crucially implicated in communicative issues of power (essentially, who defines risk and who challenges them); categorisation (how risk are categorised and given priorities); distribution (how risks are distributed through a community and how such distribution is controlled); and the cross-cutting issues of regulation (how systems of governance are applied to regulate risks); negotiation (how social and cultural interests and values affect the framing, interpretation, and presentation of risks); and mediation (how the communication of risks is mediated through, for example, regulatory frameworks, methods of assessment and modelling, new technologies, media organisations, public relations, marketing and social networks).

By taking this orientation, the book as a whole seeks to enrich and explore the potential of risk as an overarching and motivating theme (Candlin & Crichton, 2011) informing applied linguistic, sociological, professional and communication research. The volume thus centrally positions risk as part of a broader research orientation premised on communication in interaction, highlighting the following key ways of positioning the construct of risk:

• Risk as based on intention and choice, and socially and contextually located

• Risk as not an event or state but a process

• Risk as relational, interpersonal and intersubjective

• Risk as a foundational socio-cultural category

• Risk as a strategic accomplishment involving risk makers, risk takers, risk perceivers and risk receivers in relation to the objects, processes and outcomes of risk

• Risk as diverse in its accomplishment, in terms of people, domains, sites and foci of risk concern

This orientation to risk underscores the need for such research to be practically relevant (Roberts & Sarangi, 1999) to specific sites and participants, and foregrounds the question of how this relevance is to be accomplished within particular projects. The orientation includes, but is not restricted to, risk as associated with particular interpretive repertoires, in particular social, organisational, and professional settings. It naturally implicates, as Luhmann (1979) emphasised, associated and personally, professionally, and organisationally relevant themes such as trust, accountability, blame, stigma, or confidence, as well as research oriented constructs such as identity, capacity, and agency, depending on the particular site of engagement (Candlin & Crichton, 2013). For example, Coffey (Chapter 3) draws on discourse analysis of talk from people leaving forensic settings and returning to live in the community to argue that the successful handling of concerns about mental illness and risk clears space for participants to deploy emergent identities. And in the context of clinical incident disclosure, Iedema et al. (Chapter 2) draw on more t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Crucial Sites and Research Orientations: Exploring the Communication of Risk
• Part 1 Communicating Risk in Healthcare
• Part 2 Communicating Risk in Legal Processes
• Part 3 Communicating Risk in Social Care
• Part 4 Communicating Risk in Environmental Management and Biosecurity
• Part 5 Mediating Risk
• Part 6 Regulating Risk
• Index