This article investigates the ways in which individuals assume two distinct viewpoints in both speech and gesture - both simultaneously and sequentially - when they represent the uncertain knowledge that characterizes risk. In the mimetic viewpoint, individuals represent events as characters in their own narrative or mimic the character viewpoint of an Other. In the analytic viewpoint, individuals move outside of embodied experience to analyze events from a distance. As part of a larger study investigating viewpoint in discourses of risk, this study suggests the important role of viewpoint in understanding individual accounts of risk. Together, speech and gesture provide a richer representation of risk than either speech or gesture alone. But viewpoints represented in gesture may be rendered invisible in written accident reports and investigations (Collins, 1990; Sauer, 1994). This study suggests that individual accounts of risk ultimately reflect highly local sensory experiences that are situated - literally and physically - by an individual's position in institutional and material sites. Within these institutions, individuals can access a range of analytic and mimetic viewpoints in both speech and gesture in order to represent their experiences. This research has important implications for rhetorical theory and risk and decision science.
This article examines the highly specific problems of roof support in coal mines to construct a theoretical framework that describes how texts represent information that is embodied, sensory, and uncertain. As this analysis suggests, workers in risky environments may follow instructions and still fail as situations change. Engineering and management approaches also may fail unless they reflect the kinds of embodied sensory information decision makers need to assess risk in local contexts. This analysis then raises ethical questions about (a) textbook notions of instructions as systematic procedures designed to produce predictable outcomes, (b) limits of particular types of information as signs or indexes of risk, (c) the role of generalized knowledge in uncertain environments, (d) the role of texts in representing knowledge that is sensory and uncertain, and (e) the locus of responsibility for safety if knowledge exists outside of written texts.
This article analyzes how culture influences the rhetorical strategies writers employ to represent expert knowledge in the workplace and the underlying values and assumptions in a culture that enable readers to understand and evoke the knowledges represented as visual and verbal narratives. The study examines the problems of risk communication in a cross-cultural context at three levels: (a) the technical problems of representing safety information in an uncertain and hazardous environment, (b) the translation problem of multiple representations and cultural understandings in a cross-cultural environment, and (c) the rhetorical problem of defining a rational basis for argument about what constitutes safety in an economic and political context. This article expands upon previous notions of cross-cultural communication as the translation processes necessary to mediate cultural difference or translate from one culture to another. In examining risk communication within a larger global context, this article analyzes the problems writers face in applying generalized models of communication practice to solve technical problems in a culturally and politically complex global economy.
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