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:

Risks in disaster volunteer organizations
Corporate scandal communication and reputation management
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.

Navigating Complexity in High Reliability Organizations. J. Ford, R. M. Rice et al.

This forum brings together 11 researchers in risk and high reliability organizing to ask about current challenges to crafting failure-free performances in organizations.

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.

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.

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