Security, Risk, Safety & Management: Expert & Academic 'Drift' Across Definitions, Contexts & Publications - Conflict, Confusion & Variance

The most common and persistent misconception among security, safety, risk and management practitioners, professionals and even academics, is the belief that we are all speaking the same language or share a consistent definition of what security, risk, safety or even management mean. They don't.

While this may seem like a trivial matter or issue reserved for academics and researchers, the consequences have real-world impacts on organisations, individuals and governments.

The extremely variable outcomes derived from distinctly differing beliefs, practices and applications of security management, safety management and risk management, conflated by various definitions and contexts, make for a mixed back of predicted, tolerable and accepted scenarios. Not all of them are good.?

In other words, when laypeople or experts talk about security, safety, risk and management, they mean different things, unless an agreed and documented definition is provided. This distortion becomes even more pronounced when individuals or experts speak about or reference each other's work. Because one conversation with subjective context becomes all the more complicated when speaking about others' interpretation or beliefs around security, safety, risk and management.

The outcome is more likely subjective gossip than applied science or empirically verifiable research. These phenomena can even take place within a single article, book or academic textbook.?

In short, security, risk, safety and management lack a consistent, reliable corpus linguistic basis, compounding linguistic uncertainty across all terms, vocations and disciplines. ?

"Corpus linguistics?is the?study of a language?as that language is expressed in its?text corpus?(plural?corpora), its body of "real world" text. Corpus linguistics proposes that a reliable analysis of a language is more feasible with corpora collected in the field—the natural context ("realia") of that language—with minimal experimental interference."

To demonstrate the scope and influence of this dependent variable, I conducted a series of thematic analyses, ethnographic categorisation and network assessments of security, risk, safety and management across eight academic and popular resources within the discipline(s).

The following provides a visual and narrative summation of this iterative analysis.?

Not only is linguistic variance related to security, safety, security and management a critical concern today, but across the entire publication timelines and available resources. The below summary highlights publications containing key security, safety and risk phrases or references over the past 100 years.

None of these publications shares the same definition, context or linguistic consistency when it comes to security, safety, risk or management.?

See: linguistic uncertainty

This means unless specifically documented or declared, the authors could be expressing anything when it comes to security, safety risk or management. Even personal, unsubstantiated opinions that are knowingly or later proven false or wildly inaccurate. Moreover, their own subjective definition may vary from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter.?

In other words, one person, organisation or government may mean one or many things when discussing security, safety, risk or management in a single document, report or book. While references and citations to other security, safety, risk and management resources may present as authoritative and supportive of a view or argument, it may in fact just be a random, accidental or intentional distortion of facts to support a particular viewpoint, ideology or finding(s).

See: citation stuffing.

In sum, the same word, context and definition vary considerably within the document, across past research and the various authors and timescales.?

HB 167:2006 Security Risk Management remains a prominent reference within governments, organisations and among select security practitioners. Despite the standard and many of the findings being superseded over a decade ago. Many cling to this reference as it is prescriptive. Like a cookbook, it tells you what to do and when, without social, threat, risk or community context. For example, crime is only cited 8 times in the publication.

As a result, security risk management is presented as a blunt instrument of checklist items to be applied and assessed, without consideration or evaluation of either threat(s) or vulnerability.

Security (n=510), risk (n=556) and management (n=316) are dominate themes throughout. Safety (n=36) is a far less frequent expression or concept, despite considerable public, private and personal safety overlap and implications, no matter the location, organisation or industry. Network relationships to both security and risk are displayed to the right of the visual. Questions of linguistic and definition consistency across these networks are likely to variance, distortion and even replacement. Contributors (n=7), and chapters (n=8) likely amplify this reality.

Notwithstanding, HB 167:2006 does not share quality credentialing across authors or contributors, and is not based on any specific security, risk, safety or management curriculum, body of knowledge or objective research (science). In other words, it remains an ensemble of personal opinions and bias (curation, selection, publication, preference, etc)

Security and Liberty approaches security from an alternate perspective. Security (n=221) and crime (n=325) dominate the thematic discourse, written by one author. However, the concept and analysis span spatiotemporal (time & geography) boundaries. As a result, despite a constrained definition, the concept and term are unlikely to remain consistent across culture, contexts, communities and even practitioners/academics.?

Corporate Security in the 21st Century expands upon this challenge/problem considerably. Greater contributors (n=19), more instances of security expressions (n=2,571) and a mixed pedigree of authors' view on dependent variables such as crime (n=274), safety (n=52) and risk (n=300). As a result, anyone's reference to security and/or risk is unlikely to identically map to any other reference, let alone across multiple authors, contexts and disciplines. Therefore, reference to this work or finding(s) is highly likely to further obfuscate the original meaning, context or relevance. Mix it with other resources, and you have a proverbial pinata of meaning, context, repeatability and reliability. Thus, creating its own security, risk, safety and management implications.?

The Handbook of Security remains the capstone of many contemporary security risk management curriculums and a nascent body of knowledge. Introducing many more contributors (n=52), words (n=459,080), chapters (n=44) and mentions or discussion around security (n=5,793), risk (n=836), crime (n=3,062) and management (n=682). With an abundance of definitions (n=105) and a highly variable suite of qualifications and experiences of contributors, it is highly unlikely they share a single, unified and consistent understanding or practice of security, safety, risk or management. Moreover, mixing and matching references within this one resource presents repeatability and reliability issues, not to mention mixing and matching across more authors, topics, timelines and contexts associated with security, risk, safety or management.?

The next few resources demonstrate and expand the proceeding observations and issues. The visuals summarise the specific nuances and variances across individual references, which collectively, further diffuse single topics such as security, risk, security and management.

As a result, when you mix and match terms, you end up with an endless plethora of combinations and defensible expressions, not to mention practices in the name of security, safety, risk and management.

World at Risk follows the highly popular and influential Risk Society. Security (n=108), safety (n=31), and crime (n=7), but risk (n=1,302) remains the dominant theme.

This in itself raises the question of how risk is formed if safety, security and crime are so infrequently considered, let alone defined, specified or consistent across experts??

In sum, security, risk, safety and management could literally mean anything and varies in understanding, evidence, practice and meaning across both experts and laypeople in vastly different ways.

Analysis of academic references, writing and research demonstrates this problem and inconsistencies here, with accompanying visuals.

As a result, practitioners, organisations and governments need to exercise considerable caution before production, application or embracing security, risk, safety or management narratives before adequately resolving inherent errors, misbeliefs, errors and subjective distortion(s) of security, risk, safety and management across disciplines, text, communities, timelines and context.

This includes the models, practices and processes informing security assessments, risk assessments, safety assessments and collective processes such as security risk management, enterprise risk management or enterprise security risk management.?

Tony Ridley, MSc CSyP MSyI M.ISRM

Security, Risk & Management Sciences