The Discourse of Crisis in Public Meetings: Case Study of a School District's Multimillion Dollar Error

Abstract

School districts are both big businesses and a form of local governance that is part of American democracy. When a crisis makes a district's democratic face relevant, the organization will experience a dilemma that does not occur in business-only organizations. This study examines the public meetings of a school board in the western United States as it confronted a multimillion dollar error. After reviewing the organizational crisis literature, background is provided on the district, the crisis, and the method*action-implicative discourse analysis. The district's crisis, the paper shows, was constructed through six discursive practices. Each is identified and illustrated. Because school boards are democratic bodies, they depend on having citizens willing to attend and speak out in public meetings, and they depend on a smaller set of citizens willing to run for and serve in these elected, unpaid school board positions. In crises, these two groups of citizens will have partially competing needs. As a result, local governance organizations will experience a dilemma regarding how to design their public participation. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research on organizational crisis and public meetings, and practical implications for citizens and elected officials.

Crisis Communication in Public Organisations: Dimensions of Crisis Communication Revisited

“…Crisis communication research has traditionally focused on private corporations and their efforts in sustaining and restoring image and trust. As a result, crisis communication theories have been developed based on private actors without sufficient attention given to the distinctive nature between corporate and public communications (Liu & Horsley, ; Tracy, ). Yet, public organisations are of particular interest because of the fact that they have significant responsibilities for preparing, communicating and managing large‐scale societal crises.…”

Democracy-Appealing Partisanship: A Situated Ideal of Citizenship

“…Such is the typical structure in both regularly recurring governance bodies such as city council meetings (Leighter & Black, 2010), school board meetings (Tracy, 2007), and university trustee boards (West & Fenstermaker, 2002), and in meetings that are specially set to decide about an action or policy that is controversial, such as building of a Wal-Mart (Buttny, 2009(Buttny, , 2010 or introduction of a Disney Park (Olson & Goodnight, 2004) in a community.…”

Metacommunication During Disaster Response

“…In identifying communication practices, AIDA is grounded in language and social interaction, relying heavily upon discourse analytic research methods. AIDA has been applied in the study of public controversies and conflicts such as problems related to the management of a school district (K. Tracy, 2007;K. Tracy & Naughton, 1994), discussions (K. Tracy & Baratz, 1993), citizen commentaries (K. Tracy & Durfy, 2007), metacommunication (Castor, 2007), and framing (K. Tracy, 1997b).…”