Enacting Humanitarian Culture: How Technical Communication Facilitates Successful Humanitarian Work

Purpose: Technical communicators should look beyond for-profit industry to develop a fuller understanding of how technical communication can support, enable, and constitute successful work practices. To illustrate, we report a subset of findings regarding how technical and professional communication supports successful humanitarian work.

Method: We conducted a three-phase longitudinal study of an international humanitarian organization. In Phases 1 and 2, we conducted phone/Skype interviews with 25 practitioners, a group including international, regional, national, and local levels of the organization. In Phase 3, we engaged in ethnographic observation of work practices in six countries and conducted a total of 95 additional interviews (in person) with humanitarian practitioners.

Results: Communication plays an important role in the success of practitioners’ day-to-day work when that communication pursues goals relevant to humanitarian culture, such as showing respect for local ways of operating. Specifically, our findings show that enacting humanitarian culture led practitioners to (a) localize how they speak, (b) collaboratively produce written documents, and (c) encourage bottom-up organizational communication.

Conclusion: We found that while many of our field’s skills and areas of expertise carried over to humanitarian environments, the values and motivations associated with humanitarian culture are what influenced the effective application of these skills and are, therefore, key to the effectiveness of communication. In particular, fine-grained localization and empowerment at the lowest level are central to professional communication that supports successful humanitarian work.

 

Are you sure you want to delete this "resource"?
This item will be deleted immediately. You cannot undo this action.
File Name File Size Download
enacting_humaitarian_culture.pdf 131 KB

Related Resources

Report
11 Sep 2013
This case study illustrates how Strengthening Participatory Organization (SPO), a Pakistani NGO, worked alongside the Popular Engagement Policy Lab (PEPL) and Raabta Consultants to implement a Complaints and Response Mechanism (CRM) using FrontlineSM...
Tags: Report, Communication As Aid
Research
24 Aug 2016
This paper presents a literature review which highlights the need for more interest to be shown in indigenous knowledge on disaster risk reduction (DRR), especially in the developing country context. The aim is to lead to better strategies which orig...
Tags: Research, Capacity Building for Disaster Risk Management, Urban Risk Reduction
Assessment or evaluation
07 Sep 2013
Overview of a variety of examples where digital media have been put to use for disaster preparedness and humanitarian assistance in Indonesia. Analysis: Humanitarians tap into Indonesians’ digital activism http://www.irinnews.org/report/98708/analy...
Tags: Assessment or evaluation, Earthquake, Tsunami