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...