Case Studies in Crisis Communication

International Perspectives on Hits and Misses

Amiso M. George, Cornelius B. Pratt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1997
• eBook ISBN: 9781136593727
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Case Studies in Crisis Communication: International Perspectives on Hits and Misses was created to fill the gap for a much-needed textbook in case studies in crisis communication from international perspectives. The events of September 11, 2001, other major world crises, and the ongoing macroeconomic challenges of financial institutions, justify the need for this book. While existing textbooks on the subject focus on U.S. corporate cases, they may not appeal equally to students and practitioners in other countries, hence the need to analyze cases from the United States and from other world regions.

The variety and the international focus of the cases, be they environmental, health or management successes or failures, makes this book more appealing to a wider audience. These cases examine socio-cultural issues associated with responding to a variety of crises.

Part I

Theoretical Approaches to and Sociocultural Perspectives in Crisis Communication

Cornelius B. Pratt

This chapter summarizes various definitions of crisis—definitions that indicate the multiplicity of perspectives in the growing specialty of crisis communication. It outlines types of crises and describes key communication theories (e.g., the theory of image restoration discourse and the situational crisis communication theory) and related theoretical formulations that undergird crisis management (e.g., the blog-mediated crisis communication model) that practitioners will continue to find useful in crisis response. Finally, it addresses the interplay between societies’ dominant cultural practices and their influence on crisis communication. It illustrates that interplay primarily from the Asian perspective, noting that the high-context attributes and Confucian principles dominant in Asian and sub-Saharan African cultures result in nuanced, indirect crisis communication, whereas communicators in dominant United States’ culture and those of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, with their low-context attributes, are wont to be direct and sometimes confrontational in their communication.

Introduction

The nearly two dozen cases in this book, all of which are based on events or incidents that occurred after 2006, have stoked the interest of communication practitioners, teachers, and students worldwide in how best to communicate in or about a crisis. Each case is presented in accordance with the best practices in the field; that is, a background or analysis of each case is provided, then the initial response of major stakeholders is presented and quickly coupled with the goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics used by the key stakeholders. Because each case focuses on a crisis, we begin our analysis by describing that concept and identifying some of the key theories that serve as “field guides” for communication practitioners as they develop or implement plans for responding to crises.

This chapter iterates the importance of theories, which many communication practitioners use, sometimes unwittingly, in a crisis. The lessons learned from each crisis are outlined as take-away gems. The next chapter takes readers to some of the nuts and bolts of crisis communication—setting the stage for providing prompt, effective responses to crises.

This chapter has five sections. The first outlines the importance of theory to crisis communication. The second and third summarize sample definitions, characteristics, and types of crises. The fourth identifies key theories that undergird the use of crisis communication strategies. And the fifth presents the interplay between a sociocultural environment and crisis communication.

Theory and Crisis

Why are theories important to our understanding of how we can communicate effectively in or about a crisis? Consider: You are about to launch a major communications campaign, this time on a nebulous, shifting terrain. You now have persuasive data on your publics: their psychographics (e.g., attitudes, use of social media, and quality and patterns of social relationships); and their demographics (e.g., ethnicity, education, and income). And you know you still need to amass, perhaps in short order, additional information on the campaign to ensure that its implementation is not tantamount to a fool’s errand. So you analyze a welter of data to decipher relevant information. Enter theory.

Our knowledge of relevant communication theories ensures that all possible contingencies have been considered well before a rollout. That essential knowledge of theory, Toth (1986) noted, “can provide a framework for coping with reality” (p. 30). From the standpoint of “normal science,” as Kuhn (1996), a philosopher of science, wrote, theory is used in “puzzle-solving” (pp. 35–42); that is, to answer questions and to solve specific scientific problems. Similarly, from the standpoint of the social sciences, a general theoretical perspective “allows scientists to go about solving the puzzles they continually generate” (Eckberg and Hill, 1979, p. 929). That perspective can enable us to do some stocktaking even as various facets of our campaign are being implemented—sometimes simultaneously. How? Because theories are indeed a lighthouse in the dark, a Global Positioning System, of sorts, such as a Garmin or a TomTom; they tell us precisely how we can most effectively implement our programs and how we can identify, segment, and connect strategically with, say, our publics—without possibly veering off course. Theories are indeed our field guide. In essence, they are also searchlights that ensure that we have a step-by-step approach to understanding, anticipating, and addressing sticky campaign or communication situations. Observations (or phenomena) on our campaign are described (what is happening here?) and accounted for and explained (what are these campaign-related phenomena and activities? How do they occur? And why and when do they occur?). We want a clear idea of what to expect as our campaign takes on a life of its own— that is, to be better able to predict processes and constraints on outcomes; to hedge our bets, if necessary; to have some order in and control of each phase of the campaign; to identify how actions undertaken in one phase and the outcomes they engender relate in an organized way to other actions in and outcomes from other phases. Thus, the practitioner has reliable descriptions and systematic explanations of possible campaign processes and outcomes. Those explanations contribute to a better understanding of how one part of the campaign or program relates to (or interacts, intersects, or unifies with) other parts. They offer compelling interpretations of the significance of each turn and each outcome. Armed with theories, practitioners are not, as it were, operating in the dark, in a vacuum. In fact, the practitioner’s actions can contribute in meaningful ways to theory building in public relations, as Botan (1989) noted:

When a public relations practitioner offers an explanation for why a public relations effort succeeded or failed, he or she is taking the first step in pro-pounding a theory. The generally accepted explanations and ways of doing things that have evolved over the years in public relations are therefore rudimentary theories.

(Botan, 1989, p. 102)

Since about the mid-1990s, the scholarly literature on crisis communication has identified several theories that communication practitioners find useful in formulating and identifying apppropriate crisis-response strategies, in predicting constraints on crisis interventions, and in implementing and evaluating crisis-communication programs. Unbeknown to some such practitioners, however, their actions were already well grounded in theories, even as crisis-communication researchers (e.g., Coombs, 1999, 2007a; Sisco et al., 2010) bemoan the fragmentation of theoretical constructs in our specialty and the paucity of investigations of their implications for or direct relevance to crisis communication.

Two crisis-communication theories—both of which will be addressed in some detail in a subsequent section of this chapter—are the theory of image restoration discourse, which focuses on what corporations can say when faced with a crisis (Benoit, 1995, 1997; Harlow et al., 2011); and the situational crisis communication theory (SCCT) (Coombs, 2007a, b, c; Coombs, 2009; Coombs and Holladay, 2010), which states that some public relations crises are best resolved if organizations adopt specific crisis-response strategies in their attempt to restore their reputations. Coombs (1995) and Coombs and Holladay (1996) illustrate, for example, how attribution theory is used to classify crises, resulting in categories that, in turn, help practitioners determine the response strategies that they should adopt.

Technology company Foxconn’s rash of 15 suicides—from that of a 19-year-old male employee on January 23, 2010, through that of the most recent in February 2011—falls into Coombs’s (2007a) preventable crisis cluster in which the company’s community raises the question: Why so much pain at this Shenzhen plant? That question is framed within the context of SCCT. And organizational responses are appropriately identified. Little wonder that more organizations are benefiting from effective crisis communication and crisis management, even from their unwitting applications of theoretical perspectives to communicating and managing their crises. But, first, what is a crisis?

Crisis: Definitions and Characteristics

Let us examine briefly the situation in which the world’s largest contract manufacturer of electronics found itself early in 2010. Foxconn Technology Group, whose parent company is Taipei-based Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Ltd, has more than 920,000 employees in China and 420,000 in a sprawling factory complex in Shenzhen, China’s coastal city in Guangdong province. That complex also has dormitories in which the company’s migrant work force lives in cramped quarters, separate from families. The company’s clients include Apple, Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Nokia, and Sony. During the first six months of 2010, beginning on January 23, 16 Foxconn employees at the Shenzhen factory attempted suicide, 12 others killed themselves, and an additional 20 were stopped from committing suicide. That was a major crisis, compounded by three factors. First, austere, bare-bones employee living quarters, which, some argued, exacerbated an intimidating corporate environment. Second, perhaps because of the preceding factor, employees’ mental health was in question. Third, the company’s hard-charging, take-no-prisoners, suffer-no-fools-gladly culture projected an organizational environment not at once conducive to employee well-being and productivity. News reports dubbed the culture militaristic and the management non-humanbased, resulting in burnout among employees (“Foxconn case,” 2010). But because Foxconn produces electronic parts for high-end technology companies, it requires excellence in productivity and zero tolerance for fallibility. The crisis that emanated from that corporate culture illustrates Hermann’s (1963) working definition of an organizational crisis as that which “(1) threatens highpriority values of the organization, (2) presents a restricted amount of time in which a response can be made, and (3) is unexpected or unanticipated by the organization” (p. 64).

Developing effective definitions of crisis has been a dynamic effort for decades, with early definitions being event- or incident-oriented and some current definitions taking a process-oriented approach, even as both approaches overlap and are complementary (Jaques, 2009). Snyder et al. (2006) state that the vague definitions of organizational crisis result in the lack of a unifying conceptualization of the concept. Even so, the numerous definitions of crisis have a common theme: unexpected events that engender unwholesome outcomes. Some such definitions and descriptions:

• Barton (2008) defines a crisis as “any event that can seriously harm the people, reputation, or financial condition of an organization” (p. 3).
• Coombs and Holladay (2010) identify the following key descriptors of a crisis: “unpredictable, expectations, serious impact/negative outcomes, and perception” (p. 238). They also state, “The term crisis should be reserved for serious events or threats.”
• Fearn-Banks (2011) says that it is a “major occurrence with a potentially negative outcome affecting the organization, company, or industry, as well as its publics, products, services, or good name. A crisis interrupts normal business transactions and can sometimes threaten the existence of the organization” (p. 2).
• Fink (2002) states that a crisis “is not necessarily bad news—merely reality” (p. 1), an observation reflected in his definition of crisis as “an unstable time or state of affairs in which a decisive change is impending— either one with the distinct possibility of a highly undesirable outcome or one with the distinct possibility of a highly desirable and extremely positive outcome. It is usually a 50–50-proposition, but you can improve the odds” (p. 15).
• Fishman (1999) outlines five characteristics of crises: events are unpredictable; threats are evident on an individual or organization; causes of the crisis are discernible; events are time-sensitive; and occurrences are a dynamic, multidimensional set of relationships.
• Gilpin and Murphy (2010) define crises specifically from a two-pronged perspective: perception and effects. They write: “Thus how an event is perceived and how it affects the people linked to an organization, both individually and as a group, will determine whether or not it is classified as a crisis and how it is subsequently handled” (p. 14). They note that crises can also be defined from a number of perspectives that include psychological attributes (how do managers feel about their involvement in a crisis?); cause (is it natural, technological, confrontational, malevolent, skewed management values, deceptive, or untoward management conduct?); and business impacts (what public perception or business shift does it engender?)
• Heath and Millar (2004) adopt a two-dimensional, rhetorical definition of crisis: technical or managerial (for example, accidents, human errors, or threats to the environment); and communication response (for example, how an organization prepares for, accommodates to, and recovers from disruptive outcomes).
• Maitlis and Sonenshein (2010) say that crises are “often situations characterized by ambiguity, confusion, and feelings of disorientation” (p. 552).
• Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide identifies eight characteristics that underlie all corporate crises: events that occur suddenly and are driven by media exposure; information that is short on relevant facts of crisis; flow of events that hampers management’s understanding of crisis and its persuasive response; loss of control over perception of crisis and its impact on company; scrutiny from corporate insiders and outsiders, including the media, government regulatory agencies, and activist groups; onset of corporate siege mentality that encourages company officials to hide behind legal aspects of crisis, making the company more vulnerable to the crisis; panic that paralyzes corporate decision making; and issue that tends to be resolved in the public arena to the satisfaction of outsiders, including the media, government regulatory agencies, and activist groups, and to the detriment of the company itself (Tortorella, 2004).
• Pearson and Clair (1998) define it strictly within an organizational context as “a low-probability, high-impact situation that is perceived by critical stakeholders to threaten the viability of the organization and that is subjectively experienced by these individuals as personally and socially threatening” (p. 66).
• Roux-Dufort (2007, 2009) takes a processual approach to crisis, viewing it as both an event and a process of the gradual organizational accumulation of weaknesses, imperfections, and vulnerabilities at different levels of the organization. Those pre-existing conditions produce a triggering event that leads to a crisis. Crisis is, thus, conceptualized as an organization’s proneness to institutional and environmental prerequisites, which lead to “the transition from a situation of normality to one of imbalance and then to a disruption” (Roux-Dufort, 2009, p. 5); and reflect the managerial ignorance that precedes the eruption of an event. Earlier, Turner (1976), in writing about “the accumulation of unnoticed events that are at odds with beliefs shared on the dangers and means of avoiding them” (p. 381), spelled out some of the fundamentals of the processual theory of crisis. Research by Shrivastava et al. (1988) built upon that perspective, which views crises as combinations of several loosely coupled and interdependent events, each one preparing the ground for the other to occur in a chain reaction.
• Snyder et al. (2006) define “organizational crisis as an extraordinary condition that is disrupt...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III Case Studies
• Index