A Model of Organizational Responsiveness to Stakeholders

RISK: Health, Safety & Environment (1990-2002) Volume 10 Number 3 Risk Communication in a Democratic Society Article 9 June 1999 A Model of Organizational Responsiveness to Stakeholders Caron Chess Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/risk Part of the Environmental Monitoring Commons, Occupational Health and Industrial Hygiene Commons, and the Other Communication Commons Repository Citation Caron Chess, A Model of Organizational Responsiveness to Stakeholders, 10 RISK 257 (1999). This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the University of New Hampshire – School of Law at University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in RISK: Health, Safety & Environment (1990-2002) by an authorized editor of University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. For more information, please contact . A Model of Organizational Responsiveness to Stakeholders Cover Page Footnote This work was supported by the New Jersey Institute of Technology's Hazardous Substances Management Research Center and an EPA STAR fellowship. This article is available in RISK: Health, Safety & Environment (1990-2002): https://scholars.unh.edu/risk/vol10/iss3/9 A Model of Organizational Responsiveness to Stakeholders* Caron Chess** Introduction An enduring risk communication question is whether dialogue really changes what a corporation or government agency does. In other words, is risk communication merely symbolic - a way of mollifying stakeholders so such organizations need not change? Or, do organizations respond with more than words? In a seminal presentation about risk communication, William Ruckelshaus, then director of the Environmental Protection Agency, championed "participatory 1 democracy" as means of resolving environmental dilemmas. However, government agencies' and corporations' reactions to 2 stakeholders have ranged widely. I suggest that what happens inside an organization affects its responsiveness to outside stakeholders. I propose a model using two variables to explore aspects of differences in this responsiveness. Examples from two case studies on chemical manufacturers' risk communication are used to illustrate the use of the proposed model. The model of organizational responsiveness is based, in part, on the following two hypotheses: 1. Risk communication may be associated with an organizational adaptation to threat in the external environment; 3 and 2. the organizational links between risk * This work was supported by the New Jersey Institute of Technology's Hazardous Substances Management Reseach Center and an EPA STAR fellowship. ** Dr. Chess is Director, Center for Environmental Communication and Associate Professor, Department of Human Ecology, Rutgers University. She holds a Ph.D. (Environmental Sciences and Forestry) from the State University of New York. Email: chess_ edu. 1 See William Ruckelshaus, Communicating About Risk, in Risk Communication: Proceedings of the National Conference on Risk Communication Washington, D.C.: The Conservation Foundation, (J. Clarence Davies, Vincent Covello & Frederick Allen eds., 1987). 2 See, e.g., Baruch Fischhoff, Risk Perception and Communication Unplugged: Twenty Years of Process, 15 RiskAnal. 137 1995). 3 When the organization's discretion is less than the discretion of another organization to control an activity, the activity is outside the organization's boundary. 10 Risk. Health, Safety & Environment 257 [Summer 1999] communication functions and risk management functions affect the extent to which organizations are responsive to risk stakeholders. 1. Risk communication may be associated with an organizational adaptation to threat in the external environment. Organizations seek to maintain legitimacy (congruence between values implied by 4 organizational actions and norms of behavior in the larger society). Lessening of legitimacy puts pressure on organizations by reducing access to resources. 5 For example, in the wake of Bhopal, chemical manufacturers had difficulty siting facilities, expanding plants, and routing trucks through neighborhoods. Also, chemical manufacturers were faced with uncertainty, i.e., unpredictable changes in variables that affected organizational decisionmaking. 6 Pfeffer and Salancik suggest that such turbulence can be more unsettling to managers than loss of 7 resources from inability to predict the future and plan a response. The proposed model of organizational responsiveness to stakeholders suggests that risk communication may be used, in part, to reduce organizations' perceptions of threat. Within this context, threat is composed of the three variables described above: legitimacy, access to resources, and uncertainty. I suggest that the greater the perceived threat from risk stakeholders, the more motivated a company will be to initiate risk communication to reduce the threat. While the threat motivates the risk communication, it does not necessarily influence the form of communication (e.g., media outreach, public meetings, advisory committees, etc.) nor the extent that the risk communication 8 conforms to accepted practices. Perception of threat is organizationally constructed, just as risk has been conceptualized as socially constructed. Risk has been characterized as resulting from beliefs and norms, not merely numbers representing See Jeffrey Pfeffer & Gerald Salancik, The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective (1978) (current thinking about the external environment focuses on norms, roles, and expectations, as well as resources related to production). 4 See, e.g., John Dowling & Jeffrey Pfeffer, OrganizationalLegitimacy: Social Values and OrganizationalBehavior, Pac. Soc. Rev., at 122 (1975). 5 See Pfeffer & Salancik, supra note 3. 6 See Lorenzi et al., Perceived Environmental Uncertainty: An Individual or EnvironmentalAttribute, 7 J. Mgmt. 27 (1981). 7 See Pfeffer & Salancik, supra note 3. 8 See, e.g., National Research Council, Improving Risk Communication (1989). Chess: Organizational Responsiveness to Stakeholders 259 illness and death. 9 Similarly, organizational environments are not merely measurable, objective realities; they are socially constructed through a process of attention and interpretation. 1 0 In other words, an organization's perception of its reality is shaped, in part, by what the company chooses to notice. 1 2. The organizational links between risk communication functions and risk management functions affect the extent to which organizations are responsive to risk stakeholders. Perrow's seminal work Normal Accidents 12 examines the links among sub-units within complex organizations that have the potential to cause catastrophe, such as nuclear power plants and chemical manufacturing. According to Perrow and the organizational theorists who have written extensively on the subject tightly coupled systems are those in which there is no "slack or buffer between two (...truncated)