Communicating for survival in the mining and construction industries: Northern conversations and Southern contextualisations

Abstract

The global South, as the collective for the peripheries of mainstream development is known, is often regarded as merely a beneficiary of Northern-borne notions in the field of organisational communication. The problem is that the Southern context and circumstance do not always mirror those of the North, meaning that these dominant, revered theories are not necessarily applicable. One Southern context is that of the South African mining and construction industries, which is seen as notoriously dangerous, plagued by various obstacles to internal organisational communication (such as illiteracy and diversity), and what Le Roux and Naudé (2009, 29) refer to as ‘historical baggage’. The research question of this article is whether congenital Northern communication theories can be adequately incorporated into the unique global South, in order to fulfil the important task of communicating safety information to employees. The article explores the appropriate implementation of the principles of the excellence theory, the stakeholder theory as well as the relationship management theory, and the research methodology includes interviews, focus groups and quantitative questionnaires at two organisations. The result of the empirical research is the amalgamation and reworking of these theories’ principles into a model for internal safety communication applicable to the South.