Challenges of Communication in a Context of Crisis: Troubles, Misunderstandings and Discords

This book questions the political tools and the basis upon which the values of an informed and objective communication rest, and that nowadays encompass most of the ordinary situations encountered in institutions. What is the fate of the involuntary drifts of communication, such as disturbances, misunderstandings and troubles, in the use of decision-making tools, participatory mechanisms, and the establishment of contractual procedures or informed consent practices? How do they open a discordant and potentially critical gap in the protocols and assessment and categorization measures that govern these institutions? How can the virtues of these drifts, whether in the exercise of sociological research or of scientific discovery be revalued? Crisis situations seem implicitly or explicitly to involve communicative issues. The efforts of normative framing of communication and of information formatting are then numerous. However, as this book shows, one can question not only the effectiveness of these efforts, but also how the actors receive them and how they transform the actual modalities of their communication processes.