ABSTRACT
High-reliability organizations are harbingers of daunting demands, risks, and accidents, which sets them apart from other types of organizations. This chapter utilizes communication literature on information seeking to create a research agenda for future organizational communication scholarship. It explains why research on occupational risk-information seeking necessitates an uncertainty management perspective. The chapter reviews organizational communication literature on information seeking, noting how each area of research in this field points to a set of important contexts and communicative dynamics for future studies on risk-information seeking. It also reviews the crisis and health communication research on information seeking, since these domains embody aspects of organizational life within industries characterized by risks and hazards. The chapter summarizes the lessons organizational, crisis, and health communication literature imparts on future risk-information seeking scholarship. Uncertainty is the most common experience among organizational workers.
