Dr. Rebecca Rice
Kevin Stoker 0:00
Welcome to this broadcast of COMversations - stories from the faculty of the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Today, Dave, my co host, Dave Nourse.
Dave Nourse 0:13
Always a pleasure to be here, my friend.
Kevin Stoker 0:15
And I have with me today Rebecca rice, Dr. Rebecca rice, whose focuses on organizational communication and risk. But Rebecca, welcome.
Rebecca Rice 0:27
Thank you. Good to be here.
Kevin Stoker 0:28
Rebecca, I want to start by kind of asking you something really interesting because I, I think that your the thing you study is so fascinating. Why risk Did you grow up fearing for your life or what happened?
Rebecca Rice 0:42
This is a great question, Kevin. And I have not really pieced together why I study such horrible things until recently. Yeah, so I study natural disasters, community collaborations after disasters, particularly fires. I've also looked at event security, mass casualty incidents, and COVID. Because we all looked at COVID in 2020. And I was actually realizing, and I think we'll get to risk professions later that I grew up with two risk professionals. First was my dad who just retired from a large insurance company that will preserve the anonymity of I guess, and I have really distinct memories of him, he took my brother to see a junkyard that was only cars that had been crashed and DUIs as a kid. Wow. So if we want to unlock my brother's trauma, it probably is that but you know, he was very control the controllables, what can you do to keep yourself safe, and he still is like that. So I think that way, all the time. And then my mom, retired, also was a flight attendant. And her job seemed like the safest job in the world to be until fifth grade, September 11. And she I remember her waking me up, and she was in her flight attendant uniform. And she said, I need you to come see something. Don't worry, I'm going to call in sick today. And that really messes you up as a kid, right? Because then you think every time your parent goes to work, are they going to be okay? And I think that that was the ultimate draw for me at first was security and how do we deal with security in the US at the local level. But I think my dad's my dad's job also informs my life in ways that I didn't recognize when I first started out.
Kevin Stoker 2:23
Now, he was an insurance investigator. He is an
Rebecca Rice 2:26
insurance manager. So he manages the claims agents so that folks you call when you crash your car?
Kevin Stoker 2:33
Well, I think it's also interesting that your brother now is in kind of a risky job as well.
Rebecca Rice 2:39
Yeah. So my brother is a land ranger at a state park. So it's kind of like a national park. But it's in Colorado, it's a state park. And Kevin and I were talking earlier, I went to see my brother recently, and I accidentally turned into my researcher self when I was talking to him. He works in a park that has really wild rapids for rafting. So class four and five rapids. And we were talking and one of the things that kind of came out and this is what happens when your sister is a researcher, she starts asking you questions is that he didn't know when he started the job, that he would likely see a couple of casualties a year because of the rapids. So he has come up on several scenes where people have fallen out of boats before. And it was interesting. Talk to him about you know, did you expect that? How do you and your coworkers talk about that? How do you cope with it after it happens? Which are kind of actually questions I asked people in my research all the time, but I had never thought my own brother is also dealing with that in his daily job.
Kevin Stoker 3:41
And how did he feel about you asking him those type of questions? Well,
Rebecca Rice 3:44
like many great interview participants, first of all, I think people love to be interviewed, even when they seem scared by it, because how truly even so I'm an organizational communication researcher, even your own family, How many questions do they ask you about your job? Not very many, right? No one wants to listen to you talk about your job for an hour, but I do. That's my job. And I love to do that. So I think like a lot of my previous interview participants, he had not thought about these ideas about his job until he said them out loud. So interviews are also part of sensemaking. And he was saying, Oh, that's a really good point. I guess I hadn't thought about that. But now that you're mentioning it, I do deal with it in these ways. So maybe he was just being he was humoring me. But
Kevin Stoker 4:27
maybe so maybe so. But tell me you grew up in Arizona. Yes, Phoenix. So tell me about growing up in Phoenix and everything and what got you to be interested in communications as a career?
Rebecca Rice 4:43
Yeah, Phoenix is an anecdote less place to grow up and it's very trendy now. But in the 90s, it was, it was a very sterile environment. The mountains are lovely. And the downtown is great now but at the time, it was like there is nothing to do in this town. It is hot. So In high school, I was in the marching band actually, and but randomly in biology class, you never know where life is gonna take you. The people who sat behind me in biology class were like, Rebecca, you're pretty funny when you do talk, believe it or not, I was very shy, you should join the speech and debate team. And I had no idea what that was. But I showed up because my friends were there. And they taught me how to speak competitively. And suddenly, you're asking your parents to buy you a suit that you can wear on a Saturday, and you're 15 years old. And you're at a tournament for 16 hours, debating, you know, current events around the prime minister of various European countries. And I had an economist subscription in high school, like what a weird activity it was. But then I got to college and I, I did not know communication was a field. I think I started out as a pre law major. And then I was an economics major. I switched majors six times freshman year. And then just freshman year, yes, just freshman year, I was trying to find myself. And then I had to take public speaking as part of the pre law requirements, and I got there and I, I remember so distinctly thinking, What do you mean, there are theories about this? Like I've been doing this stuff for years as a hobby. And you're now telling me that people have tested this and they can tell me why this kind of attention grabber works, and this one doesn't, or why you need to connect with your audiences. And the theories just started to follow me around. So I kept taking the classes. And that's how I became a cop major. And then I just never stopped being a QA major,
Kevin Stoker 6:28
I guess. And that was in northern Arizona. Yeah, that was a Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, which is where you met your husband. That is
Rebecca Rice 6:37
true. Yes. I met my husband in a freshman English class. Oh, really?
Kevin Stoker 6:41
Well, tell us about that. We want to hear how did that come about? You
Rebecca Rice 6:44
I I've listened to this podcast. And I'm aware that meeting spouses is an important anecdote on this podcast so far. Yes, my husband and I were in the same English class freshman year, it was at 8am. I am a morning person, he is not the class was in my dorm, like in the bottom floor of my dorm, he had to walk a fair distance to this 8am class. So I would get there in my PJs thriving like love English classes, love 8am classes, he would get there wrapped in like a beanie and six layers, not happy to be there. And truly, I really do believe in intuition. But I never noticed him because I loved the class. I love books. I had my little chatty friends in the corner, the very last class period. For some reason, he took the beanie off. And I remember looking over and be like, Who is this guy who spent in this class the whole time. It was like I had never seen him before. And I really had a weird feeling of not like, I'm gonna marry this person, right. But I had a feeling of this person needs to be in my life in some way. And I befriended him based off of that feeling. Fortunately, he decided to ask me out instead of just be my friend.
Kevin Stoker 7:54
That's great. Yes. Great. So from there, you went to Montana? Yes, I did. Why Gautam. I mean, it's kind of, I guess, northern Arizona. Oh, we're not North enough. Let's go to Montana.
Dave Nourse 8:07
We go. We'll talk about extremes, right. From different climates, at least.
Rebecca Rice 8:11
Yeah, Flagstaff, fun fact. From my time as an admissions intern in Flagstaff, Flagstaff gets more snow than Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota. So it is an intense leaves. Now we place to live actually. But Montana, I have no idea why I moved to Montana. I just I had lovely mentors at the undergraduate level. And they invited me to apply to various master's programs. And one of them had gone to Montana for her undergrad. And she said it's a fantastic program. It's just a great place to be. Similarly, on an intuitive level, I went to visit it. It wasn't not cute when I went to visit, right? It was January in Montana, in Missoula. January is not that. I mean, Missoula is very cute. But everywhere when it's been beaten with enough snow, it's not so Scenic. But I just felt like oh, this seems like a really great place where people are very collegial. And people really got along and wanted to know why I was there and what I was interested in. So yeah, I just packed up my life and moved to Montana completely by myself, which is now a weird out of body experience for me to just move to Montana like that. But it was it was a wonderful time. It's a great master's program. It's, it's a very collegial place. It's also a lot of people come from out of state to that program. So those people are now kind of my academic family because we had no one else and we were very cold. And there was a winter where there were two blizzards in a row. And we just sat in my shared apartment with the rest of the grad students for like two weeks straight. We just baked cookies and played board games, because there was nothing else to do. Well, that will bond you
Kevin Stoker 9:46
will, but you told me you did something really interesting. Since you moved up there by yourself. You were there a few days before anybody else showed up? Tell them what you did.
Rebecca Rice 9:56
Yes. There is a moment when your parents dropped you off and In graduate student housing and you are sitting by yourself and you know that your graduate student roommates are not coming for 48 to 72 hours. And in that moment, I realized if I do not leave this apartment, I will not use my voice for the next 72 hours. So I went out and I walked downtown Missoula is pretty small and walkable. And I bought a bike at the played against sports store. And I remember like, talking to the person selling me the bike for kind of a long time because I was like, ah, human interaction. Fortunately, Missoula is a place where you can talk to anyone for like 20 to 30 minutes without them ever batting and I one time I was on the phone with my husband. Now husband, we did long distance at the time, and I was in the grocery store line. I said, I'm just going to set the phone in the basket, will I check out? And I accidentally talked to the cashier for 15 minutes. And I picked the phone back up. And he was like, Who was that? And I said, I don't know. He said, How do you not know that you just talked to them for 15 minutes, but that is Missoula as a town. So fortunately, it was a good place to be alone, because you're not alone very quickly. But I biked the bike back to my apartment, met my roommates. And it was all good from there.
Dave Nourse 11:08
What a great, what a great start to that experience. That's fantastic. So you're here in Las Vegas, junior faculty member, doing a lot of exciting research right now, tell us a little bit about kind of what your research agenda is? What are you really focusing on these days? And then I want to ask you about some of the classes that you teach. But let's talk research first.
Rebecca Rice 11:27
Okay, let's do it. So my research to this point has been about emergency management organizations, which are often city and county offices, employees of your city and county government who are literally tasked with preparing for every hazard that could impact your community. So everything from a fire to a shooting to a big sporting event coming to town, they are told to prepare for all of it, they often get some of their funding from FEMA, Federal Emergency Management Agency. So they also have to communicate a lot with the state government and the federal government. And I've been really interested in how does that all work? I think there are a lot of jokes that FEMA is expense out there in the world already about their abilities to handle natural disasters. But how do you as city and county government handle having to collaborate across all of these levels of power all of this different money, and then depending on the emergency are facing, you need a vastly different set of stakeholders to be involved. So my first set of research was around event security, which involved you know, whatever the event venue was, and a lot of police work. Then I studied wildland firefighting, which involves all of these tiny little fire agencies that have to work together because you have one truck and they have four and these people have two helicopters. And it becomes like an SAE question, right? How are we going to fight these six fires across the state with 400 engines? Now these engines can't go up that hill these engines can. So there's a lot of communication and negotiation going on? Then I started studying COVID Because that is what suddenly every county was dealing with what you do. Yeah, so I watched their virtual collaborations during COVID. So how do we stay apart but still be on the same page when we can't be in the same room breathing the same air that involved a lot more public health officials, right. And a lot of those folks, if you've been preparing for fires for a decade, or several decades, and you haven't had a big flu outbreak, you might not know the public health agencies that well, and they might not know you, or why they should trust you and come to your Emergency Management Office. So that was the next thing I did. Then the counties I was researching caught on fire during COVID. And now we had an issue of, um, so you can help me think of the name branding for this. Is this a cumulating disaster? Or is this a cascading disaster where now you have multiple emergencies going on at the same time? And they're they're starting to kind of interact with each other in funky ways, right? So that's what I've been doing until now. We talked a little before we got on the air. I'm next I think I'm turning to risky professions beyond emergency management, just people who have to deal with risks to life, property safety in their everyday jobs. How do they manage that differently? And you know, they might be more comfortable with thinking about risks and bad days and bad things that might happen. Then the rest of us who are often pretty risk avoidant, we don't want to think about the bad things. So when we talk to those professionals who have to think about the bad things, what can they teach us all about dealing with uncertainty in our lives? That said, I mean,
Dave Nourse 14:32
you think about all of us. And as we talked about, before we started recording all of us deal with some form of risk in some way, shape, or form. But these are professionals who do it and think about it at different at a different level. Just given all of the research that you've done all of the conversations that you've had, is there one major takeaway that you know, those of us who don't think about risk professionally, I mean, is there something that we all can learn based upon what you have researched? Over the years?
Rebecca Rice 15:01
Yeah, that's a great question. I think that depending on the field, different professions have different obvious advice for you. And one question I love to ask. And I actually asked this of like every Uber driver ever, is, what's one thing you wish people knew about? Based on the job you have? Like, what's your expertise? And what do you wish people knew about it? And I have such a strong memory, I had a friend who graduated with a public health degree. And I said, What's the one thing you wish everyone knew now that you had this degree, and she said, get a flu shot. Because the flu is a preventable death, you're passing it to people without knowing. And then people are dying. And this is something that if we just would all go get a flu shot, we would reduce so much risk of serious illness. This was pre COVID, right that she said this to me. So there's a lot of you know, I have a friend who works in cybersecurity. He's definitely all about not reusing passwords, putting your two factor authentication on. So I think based on whatever your job is, you start to have these things that you're like, ah, everyone would just do this one thing. The other thing I see across these professions and emergency managers, in particular, are delightful about this is a real can do attitude when things are going wrong, kind of like a gallows humor, like, Oh, of course, that would happen today, we already have this happening, why when this other thing happened, I had an emergency manager say to me once, I don't want anything bad to happen. But if something bad happens, I want to be there. So instead of running away, these are the people who are going to run toward the fire. And I think that that's hard for all of us to practice. You know, if you've ever had that emergency moment where you've seen someone get injured, or you've seen a car accident or whatever, we have that freeze moment. And these are the professionals who have trained and trained and trained so that the freeze moment gets smaller and smaller, and their decision making gets faster.
Kevin Stoker 16:48
You know, that makes me wonder, how about you? Do you? Would you be the one running towards it? Or how would you handle it?
Rebecca Rice 16:57
I think it absolutely depends on the situation. But I have since I started undertaking this research, I found that I am more likely to be the person who says, Wait, something's not right here. Do we need to call some emergency services about this? I don't want to get too gnarly. But I did have a moment where I saw someone get semi injured at the gym. And everyone froze, right? Everyone was just standing in a circle, staring at this person who was bleeding. And I was the first person to kind of snap out of it and be like, Okay, I have to go like there are band aids at the front desk. We could figure this out. But it's natural, right, that we all have this freeze moment. And I think that just reflecting on what would I do next time is really useful to think about. And then you kind of get better at dealing with it. And there are classes you can take to one class you can take is called cert CRT. And that's about community triage efforts so that if you see someone who's injured or if there's like, some sort of large scale disaster where a lot of people are injured, you have basic medical skills where you can help them.
Kevin Stoker 17:57
You know, one of the things I was interested in as you as seems like you actually worked
Rebecca Rice 18:01
with the boulder, the Emergency Management Office, yeah,
Kevin Stoker 18:05
the Emergency Management Office there and they gave you an award. They did
Rebecca Rice 18:09
I got a sheriff's citation, which sounds terrifying. But it turns out is an award from the
Dave Nourse 18:14
sheriff. This is this is a citation you want to get from the sheriff.
Rebecca Rice 18:17
They told me if I keep it in my car, I can get off speeding tickets. So
Kevin Stoker 18:21
yeah, I'm only in Colorado. Yeah. So it's not very useful
Rebecca Rice 18:23
to me.
Kevin Stoker 18:25
We should say that you did your PhD work at Colorado? Yes. University of Colorado. And what was inspiring? Well, you know, what really kind of inspired you while you were there?
Rebecca Rice 18:34
Well, I like many before me, I definitely stumbled into my research track. I said, you know, with my mom and her career, I wanted to study Homeland Security. But it turns out if you want to do ethnography, which is what I do, so that's observing people at work, if you go up to Homeland Security, and you ask to come watch what they're doing, they politely declined. And my adviser Brian Taylor, who does excellent Cold War studies, he suggested, he said, You know, I think there's these these guys at the sheriff's office who have to talk to Homeland Security. I don't know what they do, but maybe they would talk to you. And that was the emergency managers. And so I went and found them. And I said, you know, can we talk about Homeland Security? And they said, I mean, Homeland Security doesn't talk to us. But sure, we will talk to you if you want to. And that's when I started to learn about these kinds of federal mandates that they're under to prepare for any and all emergencies, but also in the day to day if you're Boulder County or even if you're Clark County, you know, how much are you thinking counterterrorism versus how much are you thinking about here, tourists safety or in Boulder, wildland fire far more likely to impact you. So it's part of their job, but it's not everything they do. So I had a lovely cohort mate had Colorado who said to me all the time, Rebecca, what you study is just so tedious sounding to me, all these people in meetings about federal mandates and all these forms they have to fill out out. And I said, that's what's so interesting about it, they are doing work that is terrifying. And yet so much of their work is bureaucratic and kind of boring. And they want to do the action hero stuff, but 95% of it is not action here.
Kevin Stoker 20:15
Prefer even though they want they do it in their in that job, they prefer not to have to do it. Yes.
Dave Nourse 20:21
So Rebecca, tell me a little bit about what you do here at UNLV. You've obviously talked about your research, but one of the questions that we love to ask is, do you have a teaching philosophy? Or do you have a particular approach that you take into the classroom, tell us a little bit about you as a teacher?
Rebecca Rice 20:36
Sure. Um, so the classes I teach are organizational communication. And then I'm also teaching interviewing and self presentation, which is a class that we made a couple years ago to respond to student needs to prepare for the job market. And then I've also taught communication theory, qualitative research methods. Next year, I'm very excited, I'm rolling out a class called Corporate scandal, aka companies behaving badly and what we can learn from them. So I like to, you know, I think that I do bring kind of the crisis communication, emergency communication stuff to class, but I also am really inspired by UNLV students and what they need, and that's kind of part of my teaching philosophy is what do you need? And what do you want to see out of the classes, and I have a real enthusiasm for practical application of communication. Like I said, the theories follow me around. And I think that they can follow students around too, if you'll just tell them, you know, you might think about this next time you're in a conflict with someone or you might think about this next time you're in a work situation, you can't really read your boss's mind about something. So what I found is that UNLV students are really driven, they're really interested in building their careers. And that's something that I've started to think more and more about in classes is, what jobs can we get after this? What products can we produce that can help future employers to see the value of the communication degree, because a lot of people think they want a communication major, but they also don't really know what they're getting with a communication major. And to me, it's just so practical, so helpful. And what I tell students is, I'm not here to teach you how to write a perfect email, or a perfect resume. I'm here to teach you about theories about how to think about what other people might be thinking, what the context is, what the background is of the people, you're talking to all of the 360 stuff that goes into designing good communication. So that translates across everything you do in your life in the future, I probably overthink every interaction I have with any person ever. But I do think that being mindful about what other people might be thinking what they might be looking for, even if it's just like, my boss might have not been happy about that, because they were hungry, because it was 1130 in the morning. But these are the things that I think communication majors bring to the table is an adaptability and an ability to think about how to communicate across every context in their future, because the technology is going to change in five years or 10 years, right that jobs might change in five or 10 years. But if you can bring that sensibility with you, I think that you're super employable. And that really excites me as a teacher.
Kevin Stoker 23:08
And I can confirm that her teaching evaluations are very good. She does very well. And her students tend to go in and find jobs and all the key things that we hoped for. There was something else to the you helped design a new class called train development that we offer soon,
Rebecca Rice 23:30
yes, we're starting a new senior class called training and development. So a lot of communication majors can go on to do kind of training at the corporate level, development of employees, leadership development, conflict management. So we're hoping to get some real life experience about that into the classroom for our seniors right before they graduate.
Kevin Stoker 23:49
And the other thing that's really interesting is that Rebecca wrote a book, and it's on authority. And sure did. Yeah.
Dave Nourse 24:00
So tell tell us, here you are with your boss and authority
Kevin Stoker 24:03
about that authority book. But you did look at it in an interesting way. So tell us about that. Yes.
Rebecca Rice 24:09
So it's called communicating authority and inter organizational collaboration. And it's kind of stems from my emergency management research up to this point. And the frame it takes about authority is that we often think of authority as something people hold, you know, you're the boss. So you have authority, but authority is made in our interactions with other people. And one thing that's really interesting in collaborations across multiple organizations is, it's not always clear who the boss is, right? You bring a couple organizations together. So you have someone's president and someone's CEO at the table. And suddenly, the titles don't mean as much as they do when you're in your home organization. So the book looks at how people kind of produce authority through interactions with other people. And the idea is that we should think of authority as authorship. So when you author what the organization ought to do You and people believe you and they go out and do that you have gained authority in that interaction. So if we became an organization, we turn into the podcast club, and I say to you both, well, we should really meet every Thursday and we start to meet every Thursday, I have staked some sort of claiming authority by saying we, so I'm making us an organization, and then I'm giving you something to do and you're agreeing to do it, which does not always happen, right? So you also see, in collaborations, people reject each other's authority. And it's not as simple as like, I reject you, you do not have authority? It's no, no, no, we agreed in the last meeting that we shouldn't be preparing for that. Or I thought we said we were going to do this. So people kind of also jockey for authority in conversations with each other. So I looked at how people gain authority both through what I called vertical sources, so hierarchy, but also through horizontal sources, which are expertise, experience, the things people draw on, like their relationships with other people that they can use to bolster their authority. And in emergency management, that's where you get the war stories coming in. Right? So it's not just who is in charge, according to the org chart, it's also who can talk about being here the last time there was a big fire. Well, I was here when FEMA came in and Oh, eight, and this is what they said. So you bring all these sources into the conversation, as you try to stake your claim on what the organization is doing.
Kevin Stoker 26:20
This, this is more a question. I'm asking for myself. How are you so productive? She is a machine? When it comes to writing and producing articles and everything else? I mean, a book, she's already working on thinking about the second book,
Dave Nourse 26:38
making us all look bad. Yeah.
Kevin Stoker 26:41
How do you pull this off? What is it? Is there some practice that you develop very early on, that allows you to have the discipline to stick to that type not typewriter computer, and a keyboard I should say, or we can stick to the keyboard and produce this impressive amount of work?
Rebecca Rice 27:03
Kevin, we can have a whole second podcast called The 30 minute writing practice, because the 30 Minute Writing Practice, I'm like a salesperson for it. And it it's around, in particular, the the website, faculty diversity.org really promotes this idea that even though as faculty, we think, you know, you should be writing, you know, what, what is our percentage 50% of your time? Well, percent 40%. Realistically, you can't really devote two days a week to writing. So the idea is you should write in 30 minute blocks, and 30 minutes a day will get you to tenure. And I truly do this, I sit down every day at 9am. And I start writing, there's no excuses, I write from nine to 930. I do not schedule meetings over it. I don't check email before because that's a good way to raise the blood pressure. And then you really the second part that's important is stand up, take a break. Because the impulse to binge right, I think we all have that where we think oh, I'll just I'll save myself by writing for four hours on this Thursday. But I don't know about you, well, if you've ever done one of those four hour writing blocks, but first of all, I don't write for the whole four hours, right, I write for an hour, and then I'm like, I'm tired. I'm going to check Facebook, and then it's been 45 minutes. And then I'm like, I feel such guilt, I better get back into this document. And then I write for another 10. And then I check my text messages, and you get tired, and you start to interrupt yourself more and more. But then Friday comes around. And you're like I wrote for four hours yesterday. There's no way I'm gonna write today, because I'm very tired after that. So I took a couple of mentoring kind of workshop classes about getting out of that boom and bust writing cycle and instead writing for 30 minutes every morning, and then moving on with your day. And if you want to do another 30 you can but if not, that's That's it, you've done what you need to do. And now you can go answer the emails.
Kevin Stoker 28:57
I love that because I actually took a class, not a class, it was kind of a seminar on writing 15 minutes a day. So I I really do buy into this trying to write everyday. My problem is because I started out as a journalist. I love the four hour marathons. Anyway, but that's great. That explains a lot of things. Well, Rebecca, I tell you, we are lucky to have you in all that your Oh, thank you seeing so
Rebecca Rice 29:27
it lucky to be here. Well, I'll
Dave Nourse 29:29
tell you what a you have been funnel, a phenomenal podcast guest thank you for coming on to conversations. But I've learned a lot. I have to I have to and I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us.
Rebecca Rice 29:41
Thank you. I think we should interview you both. Next. We should have everyone come back in and we'll turn the tables. What do you think?
Kevin Stoker 29:48
You know, I prefer this side. It's easier asking the questions and answering the question.
Rebecca Rice 29:54
I'll draft my list of questions.
Dave Nourse 29:57
Rebecca, thank you so much for joining us.
Rebecca Rice 30:01
Good to be Here
