Dalarna University's logo and link to the university's website

This study analyses experiences with and in relation to issues of risk, responsibility and evacuation in workplace settings as discussed in four focus groups in Sweden and Swedish-language Finland. The discussions, and in particular the participants’ positionings in their ‘small stories’, are analysed from two perspectives: that of narratives, and that of interpretive repertoires. The main question under investigation is how employees at different workplaces discursively construe their sense of responsibility in the face of risk and evacuation situations. The findings show that these issues are handled very differently in different workplaces, but at all in accordance with the participants’ implicit responsibility positionings and what we see as the interpretive repertoires (organisational, instinctual, skills-based and informational) they draw on. Whereas previous studies have considered workplaces with high-stakes settings, the present study is set in workplaces where risk is not thematised on a regular basis, making the results applicable not only to workplace scenarios, but to society at large.

Risk communication research spans many domains, including the environment, healthcare, science and technology, law enforcement, banking, workplace health and safety (e.g. Chrichton et al. 2016). The EXIT project deals with issues of security and responsibility in relation to communication about evacuation, e.g. in fire hazards or terror attacks. Our study focuses both on what evacuation information to the general public looks like and on policies and attitudes behind specific evacuation information guiding the general public. We see evacuation information as a possible resource for the distribution of responsibility. The aim is to investigate how groups and individuals construe their sense of responsibility in relation to evacuation: (a) How do people discursively construe their sense of responsibility in the face of risk and evacuation situations?; (b) To what extent does their interpretation of what to do correlate with the intentions of the policy makers producing and sanctioning the evacuation information (on signs, websites)?; (c) What is the purpose of the meaning production in this field of discourse: is the primary function to make evacuation as efficient as possible in a risk situation; is it to educate the public in how to behave in situations of risk; or is the giving of evacuation information a mere ritual? As a first step of data collection, we have analyzed evacuation signs and conducted focus group discussions at a higher education institution in order to evaluate participants’ understanding of evacuation practices and individual responsibility within the institution.

References

Crichton, Jonathan, Candlin, Christopher N. & Firkins, Arthur S. (Eds). (2016). Communicating Risk. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.