Marketplace Commodification of Risk Communication: Consequences for Risk Bearers and Implications for Public Relations

• In Event: Risk Communication and Perception

Abstract

Society’s attempt to understand and communicate about risk may be the most fundamental aspect of this conference’s theme regarding the multiple ways communications affects and directs life’s trajectory. To support responsible practice in what has become known as the risk society, public relations scholars and practitioners are obligated to consider the intended and unintended consequences of risk communication and management. The purpose of this paper is to take critical stock of public relations scholarship and practices in the daunting complex that has become known as the infrastructural approach to risk communication. This approach blends critical judgment of the community structures where risk is discussed and the discourse in which it is analyzed as the foundation for risk governance needed for fully functioning societies. The critical lens of postmodernism reveals how an unfortunately increasing amount of risk communication scholarship and practice has evolved into a new professional, industrial, and societal hegemony that often marginalizes risk bearers and risk arbiters as a nuisance in an otherwise modern and elitist approach to risk control through which risk communication becomes a “priced commodity.” Such commodification can empower organizations to take further risks because of the perceived confidence that its robust risk management programs and risk communication teams, including public relations, can control the dialogue and thereby help protect it from business continuity failure. The great challenge is whether risk communication and management ultimately favors the interests of elites over, and even to the marginalization and subjugation of, the interests of risk bearers and arbiters.

Authors

• Michael J. Palenchar, U of Tennessee

• Robert L. Heath, U of Houston

• Abbey Blake Levenshus, U of Tennessee

• Laura Lemon, U of Tennessee