Risk communication in the workplace: An analysis of 'Communications Toolkits' as rhetorical practice.

摘要

This dissertation focuses on rhetorical practices in occupational risk communication. Risk communication is the exchange of information and perspectives relating to issues of uncertain harm or loss. Accordingly, occupational risk communication restricts such exchange and provision to issues concerning the workplace. The study examines the Communications Toolkits written at a Fortune 500 automotive manufacturing plant. The Toolkits are a weekly document written by the plant's Safety Department for the purpose of teaching employees to avoid injuries that may result in lost work days. More specifically, this study develops systematically-derived taxonomies of written discourse based on Aristotle's taxonomy of enthymemes and topoi, as discussed in his Rhetoric. This taxonomy is then applied to the Communications Toolkits to determine the topoi used and the extent to which they occur among the enthymemes found in the documents. In so doing, the examination observes and analyzes the manner by which the Communications Toolkits complicate existing representations of risk communication and, more specifically, occupational risk communication. By assessing qualities of the Toolkits, the study suggests that a subdiscipline of the field exists that may be more narrowly distinguished as safety communication. This study finds that the Toolkits are comprised of topoi that deliberate about future safety and praise current actions rather than analyzing past problems. Thus, safety and risk differ in substantive ways: safety communication looks at preventing future harm and affirming community values whereas risk communication assesses posited future harm and either remedies or measures past harm. Future work must more carefully ascribe and delineate how arguments are constructed in the safety communication subfield and to what end within the larger scope of occupational risk communication.