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Candlin & Mynard ePublishing: encouraging, exploring, enabling

Communicating Risk in Systems, Communities, Organisations, and Professions

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Series editor
Dr Arthur Stuart Firkins is an international  risk communication consultant within  communities, professions and organisations.  He holds professional qualifications in education form the University of Technology, Sydney and a Masters degree in Applied Linguistics from Macquarie University Sydney. Moreover Arthur Studied for his PhD under Prof. Chris Candlin in the area of Risk Communication which focused on systems and organisations.  Arthur has an abundance of practical experience having worked in the civil service in Australia as well as in international education in different parts of Australia, Hong Kong, Malta (EU), Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and Brunei. He has also worked for SEAMO, the South East Asian Ministry of Education. Arthur has applied risk communication across  a number of fields including child protection, health, for training  midwives,  for the environment, and  also in mental health, social care, law and finance and within systems such as schools and health care extending through to fields that include military purposes in both the public and private sectors.  He recently worked for BAE Systems in the Middle East. He co-edited (with Jonathan Crichton and Christopher Candlin) Communicating Risk published by Palgrave McMillan / Springer. The present series extends the discourse and communicative approach taken in this book.

About the Series

Overview

Issues of RISK are foundational to people’s lives in contemporary societies, a fact sharply highlighted by the recent history of inter-relational practices associated with the financial markets, Covid 19 and international security. The business and economic world has increasingly been concentrating on the management of a portfolio of desperate risks, while the management of risk has also become the focus of the activity of government, particularly for health and social policy, where the communication of risk occurs as a crucial component of daily work  In essence risk is the defining construct of the modern age.
Exploring such issues is central to our understanding of how professional practice impacts on human relationships in social life. We live in a world described by Beck (1986/1992, 1999; and by Giddens, 1997) as a ‘RISK society.’  It was the overarching argument of the Risk Communication book (2016)  that much of the existing risk communication research up till then was dominated by attempts to reconcile the differences in how risk is defined, analysed and communicated through attempting to understand why the ‘less’ informed public do not agree with the better informed ‘experts.’

Hence the Risk Communication book took the position that RISK is not simply concerned with the identification of ‘hazards,’ in its negative projection and ‘opportunities’ in its positive projection, but is also implicated in issues of power, (essentially, who exercises it and who challenges it), categorisation (how RISKS are categorised and given priorities), and distribution (how RISKS are distributed through a community and how such distribution is controlled). RISK can be a stimulus for positive change, as agents may adapt their behaviour positively or change their behaviour to avoid a hazard. Accordingly, the book addressed both positive and negative views of RISK.

The Risk Communication book emphasised how 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. 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.
Despite the emphasis placed by many theorists on the rational and relational nature of RISK, what is significantly absent in sociologically, organisationally, and social psychologically-informed studies seeking to define, categorise, and appraise RISK, especially within Systems, Communities,  Organisations and Professions, is a focus on how such RISK is discursively and jointly constructed through interpersonal interaction employing various modalities and in particular contexts of use.

The Risk Communication Book served to fill a gap as relatively few studies which have engaged in interpretive studies of accounts of the interactional accomplishment of RISK have been limited to few and single domains and sites, rarely drawing on discourse data, and not explicitly seeking the inter-domain and inter-site perspective we intend for this volume. RISK here emerges, not as restricted to particular disciplinary formulations or theoretical orientations, but as multiply interpretable, depending on the particular locations, research orientations and modes of collaboration between and among participants, and between them and researchers.

By taking this approach, the Series: Communicating Risk in Systems, Communities, Organisations, and Professions as a whole seeks to enrich and explore the potential of RISK as an overarching theme informing applied linguistic and discourse analytical research.

The Series

Risk is ultimately discoursed and it is therefore it is essential that there is further work that emerges from the Risk Communication book that contributes to the understanding of how risk is discoursed. The series extends the mental model approaches and communicative emphasis laid out in the Communicating Risk volume and further extend this to specific sites which will become a focus of each book making up the series. The series centrally positions RISK as premised on communication in interaction, highlighting the following key characteristics:

  • RISK is subject to intention and choice, and is socially and contextually located
  • RISK is best seen not as an event or state but as a process
  • RISK is relational, interpersonal and intersubjective
  • RISK is a social and cultural category
  • RISK inheres in systems sustained by natural actors
  • RISK is mediated through processes of conscious strategic communication
  • RISK embodies diversity in its realisation and accomplishment, in terms of people, topics, domains and sites
  • RISK can be categorised and appraised by means of descriptive, interpretive and explanatory analysis of discursive practices in naturally occurring encounters

Contributions to the series

​To address this discursive construction of RISK, we will encourage contributors to explore how the theme of RISK is salient to their particular theme, locations and research orientations.

The series will  distinguish RISK from semantically allied terms such as DANGER or HAZARD and will encompass both external and manufactured RISK, risk perception, RISK as understood from particular cultural perspectives and RISK as understood from particular institutional memberships. Further, we will particularly ask contributors to indicate and emphasise any practical consequences of research into RISK, in terms of systemic interventions, policy change and interpersonal mentoring.

The sites which each book will focus on may typically involve inter- or intra-professional encounters in particular professions and organisations, whether or not engaging lay-persons, such as those associated with:
  • Legal Processes and Law Enforcement
  • Healthcare Encounters and Service Delivery
  • Education and Contexts of Learning
  • Social Work and Client Care
  • Political Processes and Community Relations  
  • Bureaucratic Systems and Processes of Governance 
  • Management and Organisational Relationships
  • Public Relations and Marketing
  • E-Communication, Transactions and Interactions
  • Surveillance and Security
  • International Relations
  • Education
  • Military
  • Maritime and Transportation             
  • Environmental Management and Protection
  • Food Security and Agriculture
  • Science, Innovation and Engineering
  • Economic Development
  • Industrial and Workplace Safety
  • Insurance and Risk Management
  • Financial Systems and Services
 
Each book making up the the series  will demonstrate how different modes of research engagement by researchers and participants illuminate the focus theme. Each book will focus on a selected site will be represented by one or more chapters in which authors report on how they have explored the central theme of RISK by means of distinct but related discourse analytical methodologies.

Accordingly, each book should:

  • Provide a synopsis of its definition of RISK and its ‘discursive realisation’ as a key feature of practices
  • Provide a condensed but critical account of relevant literature and research studies/foci
  • Provide one or more case studies as analysed examples of practice displaying the collaborative methodologies engaged in such research
  • Provide an account of the practical consequences of relevance of such research
  • Provide an indication of the potential for further research within that site/field and/or comparatively with other sites/fields

Moreover each book will emphasise:
​
  • Approaches to defining DISCOURSE(S) and COMMUNICATION: (focus on themes of interaction, communication, construction, discursive strategy, reflexivity, interdiscursivity and the need to adopt both historical and contemporary perspectives)
  • Approaches to defining RISK: (focus on locating the origins, appraisal, management and mitigation of RISK in relation to particular professions sites, events, participants: issues of positioning and subjectivisation; differential understandings; social-theoretical orientations)
  • Approaches to researching RISK COMMUNICATION: (focus on ways of interconnecting different methodological perspectives in research in relation to specific sites; how such perspectives are grounded in different motivational relevancies, inter-professional relationships of researchers and joint problematisation with participants; challenges of achieving practical relevance)
  • Approaches to locating RISK COMMUNICATION: sites, participants and data (see below in relation to different foci within particular sites)
  • Approaches to deriving practical action consequent upon research into the DISCOURSES of RISK: (focus on systemic interventions within organisations, mentoring and professional development).

References

Crichton, J., Candlin, C. N., & Firkins, A. S. (Eds.). (2016). Communicating risk. Springer.

Target audiences

  • Professionals
  • Managers
  • Students
  • Academics in risk management
  • Private and Public Sector professionals

Key features

Each ebook will:
  • be written or edited by experts in the field
  • link theory to practice and back again
  • contain links to further resources
  • point the reader towards potential areas for research and practice
  • contain between 40,000 and 70,000 words 

Possible contributions to the series could include books on:

  • Communicating Risk a Communicative Mental Model Approach
  • Risk Communication in a post Covid world
  • Risk Communication in Child Protection
  • Risk Communication and Mental Health
  • Risk and Law
  • Communities of Risk

Prospective authors should contact the series editor giving a brief overview of their focus area. Depending on the scope, we will then provide a proposal form and solicit further details and sample material.

Topics should be well-researched and scholarly in nature, yet written in accessible and engaging style, involving the reader in issues in the risk communication context. Like all the Candlin & Mynard books, they are there to help readers encourage, explore and enable their thinking and practice.