Research
My research examines emergency and risk organizations and corresponding communication around crisis, resilience, and organizational trauma.
Currently, my projects focus on emergency collaborations. First responder and emergency management organizations face unique challenges to collaboration due to their high-stakes operating environments and hierarchical cultures. Despite these constraints, risks and emergencies often exceed organizational boundaries and require multiple organizations working together.
Current projects include:
Virtual collaborations during the COVID-19 pandemic
High reliability organizing and sensemaking surrounding nonhuman agents (e.g., natural disasters and biological agents)
Professional fields and conflicting frames of trauma after mass shootings
Gendered scapegoating of climate disasters (e.g., the 2020 "gender reveal" wildfire)
Collaborating around "unseen" and compounding disasters
Tourist safety and perceptions of risk during travel
Check out my articles on Google Scholar.
Communicating Authority in Interorganizational Collaboration
My book (Routledge) offers an in-depth analysis of issues of authority in collaborations. I treat authority not as a question of simply "who is in charge" or "who makes decisions," but instead a question of "what should our collaboration do?" Authority is a challenge to collaborations, because they bring together multiple organizations and must negotiate shared priorities out of different (and sometimes competing) organizational interests.
Authority is not simply leadership, instead, authority is negotiated authorship of the collaboration. In other words, authority is not something members of organizations hold or possess, it is achieved in negotiations of the collaboration's path and mission.
The book uses examples from the world of emergency and disaster collaborations to rethink previous cases of collaborative response gone wrong as uniquely linked to authority. Preorder is available here.
Recent Publications:
Involuntary adoption of ICTs during emergencies: Temporality of technology use in virtual collaborations. R. M. Rice & N. Pennington.
In Management Communication Quarterly, Natalie Pennington and I identify involuntary adoption of communication technologies as a unique communication process during emergencies. We found that crises are shaped and understood through Information Communication Technology (ICT) use--the more ICTs engaged, the more participants perceived a crisis.
Constituting Absence as Reliability: The Case of COVID-19 Response Networks. R. M. Rice.
In Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, I explore how organizations that were not traditionally high reliability organizations sought reliability during the COVID-19 pandemic, and found that the process of "datafication," or producing numbers about the COVID-19 pandemic, allowed public health organizations to discuss reliability benchmarks.
Feminist Theory and Interorganizational Collaboration: An Ethnographic Study of Gendered Tension Management. R. M. Rice.
In Communication Monographs, I join feminist theory with interorganizational collaboration research to consider gender and race as constitutive features of collaborations. Using ethnographic data, I found that collaborators engaged with gendered discourses, which created tensions in their decisions about the collaborative structure, processes, and goals. Further, gendered values influenced the management of these tensions and tended to favor professions that were culturally associated with white masculinity.
High Reliability Collaborations: Theorizing Interorganizational Reliability as Constituted Through Translation. R. M. Rice.
In this Management Communication Quarterly paper, I question a major assumption in collaboration research, that a key incentive to collaborate is resource sharing. Instead, in crisis collaborations, I find that containing and controlling stakeholders within emergency scenes is an incentive to collaborate.