Homeland Security Cultures: Enhancing Values While Fostering Resilience - Hardcover

Alexander Siedschlag; Andrea Jerkovic

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1786605910 ISBN 13: 9781786605917

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018

Synopsis

Homeland Security Cultures: Enhancing Values While Fostering Resilience explores the role that culture plays in the study and practice of homeland security in an all-hazards, whole-community, and all-of-government scope. It does so by analyzing and discussing strategic, organizational, operational, and social cultures in the U.S. Homeland Security Enterprise, as well as from an international perspective. The focus is on how knowledge and interpretation, normative values, common symbols, and/or action repertories inform the evolution of the homeland security mission space and the accomplishment of homeland security functions. Contributions also address institutional changes designed to foster a more coherent common homeland security culture.

This textbook will make a contribution to the evolution of homeland security as a policy area and a field of study by offering actionable insight as well as critical thinking from scholars and practitioners on how cultural aspects matter in balancing security against liberty, in managing complex risks, in enhancing collaboration across sectors, and in explaining how a resilient nation can be fostered while enhancing liberal and democratic values.

About this title

About the Authors

Alexander Siedschlag is Professor of Homeland Security at Penn State Harrisburg School of Public Affairs, in a joint appointment as Professor of Public Health Sciences at the Hershey College of Medicine and serves as Chair of Penn State Homeland Security Programs.

Andrea Jerkovic is Acting Director of the CEUSS | Center for European Security Studies, Austria.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Homeland Security Cultures

Enhancing Values while Fostering Resilience

By Alexander Siedschlag, Andrea Jerkovic

Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.

Copyright © 2018 Alexander Siedschlag and Andrea Jerkovic
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78660-591-7

Contents

List of Illustrations, vii, 
List of Abbreviations, ix, 
1 Security Cultures in Action: Introduction and Overview of Chapters Alexander Siedschlag, 1, 
PART I: DOMAIN ASPECTS, 41, 
2 The Cultural Challenge in Countering Violent Extremism and Counterterrorism Noor Z. Razzaq, 43, 
3 Mismanaging America's Demographic Shift, the Rise of Violent Extremism, and Responding to a Culture of Fear Ygnacio V. "Nash" Flores, 65, 
4 Comprehending the Polar Shift in Border Security Culture: Restoring Effective Sovereignty James Phelps, J. Michael Bozeman, and Monica Koenigsberg, 79, 
5 Putting U.S. Cybersecurity Culture in Perspective Daniel G. Sofio and William A. Carter, 103, 
6 Achieving a Culture of Disaster Resilience Chad S. Foster, 127, 
7 Designing High-Reliability Security Organizations for the Homeland Security Enterprise Anthony J. Masys, 142, 
PART II: COLLABORATION ASPECTS, 163, 
8 Mass Casualty Shooting Events across America: Examining How Organizational Cultures Adapt to Emerging Patterns from the Homeland Security Perspective Sam McGhee, 165, 
9 The Use of Military Forces in the Homeland: Understanding the Cultures within the Culture George M. Schwarz and Bert Tussing, 186, 
10 Fusion Centers: Bridging State/Local Law Enforcement and National Intelligence Culture Thomas Bruneau and Diego Esparza, 203, 
11 Cybersecurity Cultural Conflicts: The Problem of Language within the Homeland Security Enterprise Ervin Frenzel and James Phelps, 219, 
12 Soft Industrial Policy Measures to Build a Culture of Trust in the Field of Homeland Security: The Case of the European Union Michel F. Bosco, 230, 
PART III: SOCIETAL SECURITY ASPECTS, 257, 
13 Homeland Security and Civic Culture: The Whole Community and the Citizen Alexander Siedschlag, 259, 
14 Resiliency and a Culture of Preparedness Martin J. Alperen, 280, 
CONCLUSION AND OUTLOOK, 295, 
15 Homeland Security Cultures to Foster a Resilient Nation while Safeguarding the "Blessings of Liberty" Andrea Jerkovic, 297, 
Bibliography, 317, 
Homeland Security Cultures Research Guide, 357, 
List of Contributors, 367, 
Index, 377, 

CHAPTER 1

Security Cultures in Action: Introduction and Overview of Chapters

Alexander Siedschlag

Reinforced by the National Security Strategy of 2017, America's goal has been to foster a resilient nation through the creation of a "culture of preparedness" since the National Strategy for Homeland Security of 2007. The central role of culture in homeland security is sometimes obscured by oblique semantics of official documents, and it is not adequately reflected in homeland security studies. This book addresses those shortcomings by analyzing strategic, organizational, operational, civic, and societal cultures in the U.S. Homeland Security Enterprise (HSE), as well as in selected international perspective. The Homeland Security Enterprise being defined as "the Federal, State, local, tribal, territorial, nongovernmental, and private-sector entities, as well as individuals, families, and communities who share a common national interest in the safety and security of America and the American population," it is evident that the study and practice of it cannot be complete or comprehensive without covering culture-related aspects.

Applying a multidisciplinary approach, this volume studies security cultures as multifaceted empirical phenomena, not in the normative perspective of prescribing a particular "good" homeland security culture. Culture is not a coherent or obvious collective fabric that achieves political, social, and organizational integration. Rather, it is of "fragmented, multiple and contested nature" and often embodied in tacit knowledge, shared cognition, and discursive practice that do not make it evident or trivial to observe. The analytical concept of culture refers not to a certain end state but to peoples' assumptions about the world. Culture can be understood as the sum of cognitive forms by which members of social communities make sense of reality, attribute meaning to facts, as well as save and reproduce knowledge and their interpretation of the world. Culture thus describes "the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another." In addition, culture reduces complexity not only in perception but also in decision-making, constraining the factual choice of options based on norms and values guiding assessments and expectations.

The general assumption of cultural approaches to security is that security postures depend on culturally embedded meanings of risk and socially negotiated sensemaking of security threats and challenges. Formation of policy preferences but also of public opinion about risks and their management is not necessarily the result of realism; it is the outcome of a certain construction of reality within cultural contexts. For example, immigrant cultures may be interpreted as the cause of social radicalization processes that mount up to threats to internal security.

Providing the background for (re)cognition or construction of problems, culture also defines at what point society will accept a problem (such as a security threat) as solved. At the same time, there are and will always be different cultural views of "the" problem. Thus, for example, differing perspectives on what is at stake in the immigration debate or continuing problems in coherently implementing national planning frameworks across tiers of government, states, and jurisdictions are not an indication of lack of proper security culture(s). In fact, "to the extent that culture is widely shared, scholars recognize this as an outcome to be explained rather than a state of affairs to be assumed."

Moreover, research has shown that culture is not a factor that directly affects action or outcomes; rather, "culture defines the range of acceptable possible alternatives from which groups or individuals may, other circumstances permitting, choose a course of action." Culture furnishes a set of "orienting dispositions" guiding peoples' perception and cognitive response to complex situations. Therefore, cultural factors have no intrinsic normative value: They may foster realistic or misguided threat assessment and exert positive or negative effects on accomplishing homeland security missions and reaching homeland security objectives.

However, this book assumes that more coherent (across domains) and consistent (over time) consideration of culture will help improve the study as well as the practice of homeland security. One main reason for this is that culture, understood as an independent variable, can explain "differences between collectivities on certain dependent variables." Cultural explanations add most value whenever differences in orientation and behavior cannot be sufficiently accounted for by structural and institutional factors, such as legal frameworks, organizational contexts, or policies and strategies in place. The task is to identify the actual empirical impact of culture on different policy areas, or contexts of security. By analyzing cultural aspects in homeland security mission domains, cross-sector collaboration, and the whole-community dimension, this book contributes to establishing a sound foundation for more consistent and coherent study and assessment of homeland security cultures, serving scholastic as well as practical purposes.

The following sections will detail the benefit of cultural analysis of homeland security, review how culture has been addressed in homeland security practice (policy and strategy), discuss the state of the art of scholastic analysis of security cultures, present the approach and analytical model used in this book, as well as offer an overview of its chapters.

CULTURE AND HOMELAND SECURITY

Representing a multidisciplinary account of multifaceted cultural aspects in homeland security, this book's chapters do not use a streamlined concept of culture. Nonetheless, the book applies an overarching, concept-proofed model of security culture as frame of reference and to integrate findings from the different contributions. Within this model, the book's focus is on how the main components of security cultures (to be detailed below) — knowledge and interpretation, normative values, common symbols, and/or action repertories — inform the carrying out of homeland security core missions as well as the evolution of the mission space. Contributions also address institutional change to foster more coherent common homeland security organizational and operational cultures.

The September 11, 2001, attacks and the response to them did not change the constitution or the political system of the United States and did not recreate its people or way of life. In particular, from the culture point of view, 9/11 was less a "game changer" than a catalyst. However, the mainstream of homeland security policy and the study of it have been based on a largely arbitrary "temporal narrative" that established 9/11 as a watershed, just overwriting any national and civil security–related experience, knowledge, and practices that existed before. In practice, furthermore, cultural aspects are often identified as "issues" that have a negative impact on the effectiveness of homeland security (although, as noted in the beginning, one of its main goals is to achieve a resilient nation by fostering a national culture of preparedness). For example, agency cultures are blamed for shortcomings in information sharing, or organizational subcultures are said to harm the efficiency and effectiveness of the national security process and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Such understanding of culture is inadequate, since over 100 years of research have demonstrated that culture is the fabric of social interaction and does not hamper organizations in performing to their mission but nourishes political institutions "through a process of consensual validation." Whenever cooperation and collaborative problem-solving in the Homeland Security Enterprise fail, it is not because of cultural issues but because of its insufficient institutionalization, with action patterns and normative expectations not properly internalized by the diverse homeland security community, for whatever reason.

If homeland security can be functionally defined in one sentence, it is distributed (whole-community based) risk management in a dynamic all-hazards context that defines its evolving mission space. This does not mean that the objective of homeland security is to address all and any hazards that might emerge. Policies and strategies in the United States and elsewhere have pointed out that in order to be effective (and affordable), homeland security needs to be selective, focusing on "the greatest risks" to security, or on those that are responsive to available strategies and technological tools. Definition of, and response to, risk is not only evidence-based but also culturally driven. It does not serve the purpose of homeland security to impose a normative ("good") culture on a diverse and widely distributed enterprise. The purpose of the study of cultural aspects of homeland security should be to enhance a society's commonly acquired values, while fostering resilience and a culture of preparedness.

At the same time, the study of homeland security cultures should not be apologetic. Among other things, it should address how security needs to be balanced with other values, such as liberty and freedom as well as accountability and open discussion. As a cultural perspective on homeland security underscores, critical thinking and continuous improvement are not signs of weakness, but a natural part of the effort and ingredients of success. Lack of critical thinking in homeland security can lead not only to self-serving policies, but also to loss of public trust and to mass casualties.

The security culture perspective helps understand how a resilient nation can be fostered while enhancing democratic values. With the requisite variety of homeland security planning and practice constantly growing, it is essential to determine the line where response to threats can infringe what a nation and its people strive to defend. The liberty versus security debate is one example. The so-called NSA Report (Liberty and Security in a Changing World: Report and Recommendations of The President's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, 2013), mandated by President Obama as a response to the Snowden case (revealing of details of U.S. government surveillance programs by leaking classified information from the National Security Agency [NSA]), pointed out how homeland security must be embedded into democratic culture:

Protecting the Right to Privacy. The right to privacy is essential to a free and self-governing society. The rise of modern technologies makes it all the more important that democratic nations respect people's fundamental right to privacy, which is a defining part of individual security and personal liberty.

Protecting Democracy, Civil Liberties, and the Rule of Law. Free debate within the United States is essential to the long-term vitality of American democracy and helps bolster democracy globally. Excessive surveillance and unjustified secrecy can threaten civil liberties, public trust, and the core processes of democratic self-government. All parts of the government, including those that protect our national security, must be subject to the rule of law.

ADDRESSING OF CULTURE IN HOMELAND SECURITY POLICY AND STRATEGY

Before turning to the state of the art of studies of security cultures, it is important to review in some more detail how cultural aspects are considered in the mission space of homeland security practice and reflected in policy and strategy. The point is that despite the grand strategic homeland security objective of fostering a resilient nation by creating a "culture of preparedness," culture has not been mainstreamed as an aspect to consider across the mission space. Rather, in homeland security practice, culture typically figures in domain-specific ways in different, often isolated, contexts. This, for example, includes culture as a target to protect, culture as a resource for prevention and protection, culture as an object of recovery, or culture as foundation for an operational Homeland Security Enterprise.

Workforce Culture

To begin with, DHS initiated the study of homeland security culture in 2007 in the form of a task force that explored a unifying normative model for the department, focused on creating an efficient context, or organizational culture, for information sharing and decision-making. In 2013, a study on A Ready and Resilient Workforce for the Department of Homeland Security concluded: "Culture supports workforce resilience by encouraging norms, values, and expectations that are consistent with and advance it and by establishing structures and practices that enable it." While focused on the normative concept of creating one single, unifying, good homeland security culture, which is unrealistic because a security culture cannot be gouged like a monument (a cultural artifact), those examples still demonstrate the practical relevance of cultural study of homeland security.

Safety and User Culture

The concept of security culture as such first emerged in the context of plant safety, to describe the psychosocial context (and limitations) of protocol implementation. While too restricted to comprehensively assess homeland security cultures, this technology-centered version of security culture is relevant to certain domains of homeland security today, for example when it comes to good user cultures for cybersecurity. The U.S. International Strategy for Cyberspace (2011) noted that the country "has been fostering a culture of cybersecurity and an effective apparatus for risk mitigation and incident response." The strategy aims at building a national culture of cybersecurity through broad raising of cybersecurity awareness. The National Security Strategy of 2017 apparently recognizes this important culture aspect to a lesser extent as it emphasizes the role of technological tools and expertise.

The citizens are the first line of defense in cybersecurity, according to the Cybersecurity National Action Plan (2016). The next line of defense then are employees in the private sector who are united in a robust enterprise security culture and harden the private sector's social defense posture against cyberattacks and privacy infringements in general: "Employees are the key to ethical business conduct, and their behavior is strongly influenced by the way they are treated and how they view management. Ethics flourish in an environment that fosters individual self-respect, loyalty, and dedication."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Homeland Security Cultures by Alexander Siedschlag, Andrea Jerkovic. Copyright © 2018 Alexander Siedschlag and Andrea Jerkovic. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd..
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Edition details

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1786605910
• ISBN 13: 9781786605917
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 408