Effects of Institutional Distances. Studies of Risk Definitions, Perceptions, Management and Communication

This thesis consists of four papers which address different aspects of risk. All the papers in the thesis relate one way or another to food risks, but food risks is not the core subject matter of the thesis. The overall theme is about how risks are defined, perceived, managed and communicated. However, the empirical focus on food risks is not a result of mere coincidence. During the past decades society has witnessed a number of food scares such as BSE, avian bird flu, E-Coli, Salmonella and Dioxin residues (Löfstedt 2006; Knowles 2007). New food risk topics related to novel foods and biotechnology such as GMO have added to the public concerns over food risks (Frewer et al. 2002; Sjöberg 2008). Obesity and other consequences of lifestyle related food risks cause severe health problems (Seiders 2004). Recently the growing concern about climate changes has led to significant public concern and media attention to the environmental impacts of food miles and green house gas emissions in food production (Weber and Matthews 2008). As a consequence of this development consumer concerns over food safety have increased steadily since the 1970s (Knox 2000). The sum of all these risks and the resulting societal anxiety are a politicization of food risks similar to that of risks related to new technologies. The politicization of food risks is accompanied by increased public demands for regulation, which, similar to the case of regulating new technologies, lead to the necessity of a better understanding of what factors drive public attitudes towards those risks. Subsequently the studies of public perceptions of 10 food risks have increased steadily over the past decades (Löfstedt 2006, Hohl and Gaskel 2008))

En systemteoretisk analyse af retssystemets håndtering af singulær lovgivning. : Et studie med udgangspunkt i Tvind-dommen

The paper takes up a well-known constitutional subject concerning the limitations of private bills by reformulating the problem in system theoretical terms. This move allows for examining how the law as a social system carries through the task of establishing distinctions between legal/illegal in a situation where there is no precedence in the form of prior court decisions. After a short introduction to Niklas Luhman’s theory about Law as an autopoietic system, including a comparison with Jürgen Habermas’ discourse theory of the law, the analysis proceeds to the only case in which the Danish Supreme Court has ruled against a parliamentary statute, the so-called Tvind-verdict. When analyzing the verdict and its reception in legal theory, the thesis points to how the court through a line of paradoxical arguments recursively construct the foundation for its decision. While remaining unobserved, these paradoxes through their reception in legal theory becomes subject to de-paradoxification and by this the theoretical self-description of the law contributes to improving the conditions for the autopoiesis of the legal system

Institutional Risk

The concept of institutional risk is defined as the risk that the regulator will not meet its organizational and policy objectives. The counterpart of institutional risk is societal risk, that is, the risks in society that regulators are entrusted to manage. In recent decades risk management has for various reasons become an attractive solution for societal regulation on all levels. Despite this successful risk colonization regulators increasingly seek to protect the institutions that manage social risks against criticism from the public. This leads to a spiraling, even pathological, effect whereby risk management expands even further to new societal domains and increasingly centers on the reputational risks of risk management institutions

Legitimacy and reputation in the institutional field of food safety: A public relations case study.

The overall objective of this study is to examine how the institutional context of food safety affects and is affected by concerns for legitimacy and reputation. The paper employs a neo-institutional approach to analyzing the institutional field of food safety in a case study of a multinational food service provider where a tension between conflicting institutional logics implied a reputational challenge. The study shows how food safety as a well-defined operational risk is transformed into a high-priority reputational risk and how actors in the field of food safety are caught in a state of mutual distrust, partly as a consequence of an intense politicization of food risk over the past years and partly as a result of their respective concerns for legitimacy. The study points to how the field of food safety is colonized by a reputational logic that is paradoxically reproduced by actors at all organizational levels even though they strongly oppose to this logic

Let’s talk about communication in strategic communication; : an analysis of students’ understanding of strategic communication and its implications

The aim of this paper is to address the importance of communication theory for the understanding of strategic communication. Underlying this focus are the debates and discussions on the definition of strategic communication, which have primarily been occupied with the meaning of the concept strategic. The definition and meaning of communication tend to be implicit or undefined and Van Ruler (2018) asks if it is “appropriate for today’s demand of organizational life” (p. 367). In this paper we study the understanding of communication, its consequences for the comprehension of strategic communication and discuss its appropriateness. To this end we have studied how students enrolled in bachelor and master programs in strategic communication initially understand communication and how enriched understanding of communication has consequences for the comprehension of strategic communication. The study is based on text analysis of XXX essays written by bachelor and master students during their first semester in a strategic communication program. Their initial understanding of communication is implicit and undefined. However, confronted with different communication traditions (Craig, 1999) the students can make their view explicit. The explicit view on communication differs between students; however, it is possible to identify two communication traditions that reoccur frequently in the student accounts. A rhetorical perspective on communication prevails among bachelor students, while a social psychology perspective prevails among master students. The latter closely linked to previous experience with disciplines such as marketing, corporate communication and other programmes on professional communication on bachelor level. We argue that these, often implicit, understandings of communication result in a particular comprehension of strategic communication, including expectations about the study program and their future as communication professionals. Strategic communication is understood as presenting and promoting goals for different audiences. These activities can be planned and controlled and thus communication is seen as something that can and should be managed. University studies are then expected to provide tools for organising this process, skills for presenting and addressing different audiences as well as detailed knowledge about different channels. Consequently, students imagine their future career as managers of communication and tend to disregard competence for analysing and understanding other aspects of communication, including their own always-already embeddedness in communication processes. We furthermore argue, that unreflected, implicit and often narrow understandings of communication among students of strategic communication result in difficulties to understand courses based on other communication traditions and emerging perspectives in the nearby academic fields of strategy and organization studies, both emphasizing their dynamic and communicative constitution (strategizing, organizing). Students tend to maintain an understanding of strategy and communication as one being the object of the other This one-sided focus loses the inherent complexity of communication, including the plurality of voices from different actors, the interplay between them and the consequences for communication processes. Hence, other traditions of understanding communication are necessary for being able to understand communication, challenges and opportunities. Let us talk about communication in strategic communication

Post-colonial governance through securitization?:a narratological analysis of a securitization controversy in contemporary Danish and Greenlandic uranium policy

The complex constitutional relationship between Greenland and Denmark has had no clearer manifestation than the last decade’s juridical and political wranglings over the control for uranium. In the article, we argue that the quarrel between Nuuk and Copenhagen found in their diverging uranium policies can be seen as what we term a ’securitization controversy’. That is, a form of negotiating process which delicately postpones securitization proper due to the entangled role of the uranium issue in the independence debate. Through narrative analysis of contemporary Danish and Greenlandic government policy documents (2008-2016) we thus demonstrate how Greenlandic documents attempt to desecuritize risks pertinent to extraction of uranium and REE while Danish government papers seek to risikfy uranium in order to keep the issue open to future securitization. In the analysis, we further show how certain risks in the policy papers are connected and constitute a narrative conflict involving identity and sovereignty. We argue, that the controversy found at policy level in turn is the result of the underlying ‘sovereignty game’ in the constitutional relationship between the two countries. The article introduces a methodological framework for studying such securitization controversies drawing on risk analysis and narratology. We argue that in order to account for the entangled and narrative nature of the discursive movements in the policy texts, structural narratology can be a viable methodological alternative to the Copenhagen School’s preferred method of discourse analysis