Crisis, Culture, Community

Abstract

Crisis communication has emerged as a specialized study field for public relations scholars and an empowerment opportunity for practitioners in the past 15 years (Grunig, Gru-nig, & Dozier, 2002). Several loopholes in current crisis communication writings are noticeable: (a) Organizational crisis lacks a shared definition, (b) a conceptual framework has not yet developed, (c) audience-orientation to crisis communication has not been addressed, (d) current crisis studies lack contextualization, and (e) crisis communication studies are predominantly Western-based. In view of this, this chapter intends to shed some light on the topic of crisis communication and its future directions. The chapter has two parts: In the first, I revisit, refine, and reconceptualize the fundamental concepts related to crisis communication. In part two I discuss the negligence of culture in extant Western-dominated crisis communication. The chapter explains the importance of considering culture in crisis communication and points to a need for international crisis communication research and practice with an audience orientation to serve the international market foreseen in the near future. Below, I review an exemplary case contrasting Hong Kong culture and Western culture to show how the macrosystem of culture affects the microsystem of stakeholders. The contention is that the two-way symmetrical model necessitates the realization of stakeholders as interpretive communities. My suggestion of a co-constructing view to two-way symmetrical communication as a normative model for international crisis communication comes at the end of the chapter.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 31 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.