Communicating Risk in a Cross-Cultural Context

Abstract

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.

COVID-19 pandemic and the impact of cross-cultural differences on crisis management: A conceptual model of transcultural crisis management

“…Ding ( 2013) raises concern about interests, biases, inequity, and exclusion that shadow decisionmaking processes of international bodies but much of it is attributed to power and politics. Limited research, namely, by Bernhardsdóttir (2015), Ding and Zhang (2010) and Sauer (1996), is available on the cross-cultural aspect of crises management. Ding and Zhang (2010) examined the role of social media in crisis management.…”

“…It is evident from their analysis that when the public attempts a bottom-up approach to influence government decisions, cultural nuances come into play. Sauer (1996) analyzed crisis communication of mining failures in the US and UK to present the influence of culture on writer's rhetorical strategies and their effect on risk communication. Bernhardsdóttir (2015) did a quantitative analysis of 137 TCM cases and a qualitative analysis of 19 crisis cases from within South Korea to analyze the effect of decision-makers' cultural values on how they prepare and respond to a crisis.…”

Analyzing Safety Communication in Industrial Contexts

“…SC is studied in terms of individual aspects or individual means by which safety is communicated. Aspects include legal conformity of SC (Helyar, 1992;Smith, 1990;Todd, 2014), requirements for the wording of instructions (Cornelissen et al, 2014;Elling, 1997;Lipus, 2006), and differences between target groups that are due to differing levels of expertise (Dombrowski, 2011;Hirst, 2016Hirst, , 2020 or cultural backgrounds (Barnum & Huilin, 2006;Batova, 2010;Evia & Patriarca, 2012;Sauer, 1996). Means include safety labels (Kemnitz, 1991;Smith, 1990), flyers (Batova, 2010;Karreman et al, 2014), and manuals (Barnum & Huilin, 2006;Elling, 1997;Tebeaux, 2010).…”

“…SC has been examined from the perspective of technical writing in different contexts such as aerospace (Dombrowski, 2006), healthcare (Batova, 2010;Bonk, 1998;DeTora & Klein, 2020;Karreman et al, 2014), nuclear power plants (Dombrowski, 2011;Hirst, 2016Hirst, , 2020, construction sites (Aphorn et al, 2003;Evia & Patriarca, 2012), mining (Sauer, 1996(Sauer, , 2011Tachino & Paul, 2005), and product design (Helyar, 1992;Kemnitz, 1991;Smith, 1990). Only a few studies examine SC in the manufacturing industry (Cornelissen et al, 2014(Cornelissen et al, , 2017.…”

Bid/no-bid decision factors for Chinese international contractors in international construction projects

“…Nevertheless, researchers in the international construction management domain are concerned with risk factors; especially country risk factors. Numerous studies have addressed the specific risks to international construction projects, such as political risks (Ashley and Bonner, 1987;Deng et al, 2014), economic risks (Kapila and Hendrickson, 2008;Lee and Walters, 1989), cultural risks (Low et al, 2015;SAUER, 1996) and legal risks (Kakoto et al, 1989;Kashiwagi et al, 1988). Moreover, other studies focused on the risk management of overseas construction projects.…”