Accounts, Excuses, and Apologies, Second Edition

Image Repair Theory and Research

William L. Benoit

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781438453989, 9781438453996
• eBook ISBN: 9781438454009
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In our constantly plugged-in and connected world, image is everything. People, groups, organizations, and countries frequently come under suspicion of wrongdoing and sometimes require defense. This fully updated edition of the 1994 volume investigates the situations in which threats to image arise and describes the image-repair strategies that may be used to help defuse these threats, such as denial and apology. The author reviews various theories on image repair, and extends prior research on the topic to include work on persuasion or attitude change. Five contexts for image repair are examined: corporate, political, sports/entertainment, international, and third party (when one person or organization tries to repair the image of another). New case studies include the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Anthony Weiner, Lance Armstrong, Apple's apology to China over the iPhone, and Prime Minister David Cameron's apology for Bloody Sunday.

Chapter 1

Communication, Persuasion, and Image Repair

People and organizations—including companies, governments, and nonprofit organizations—frequently face accusations or suspicions of wrongdoing. A glance at newspaper headlines, televised news stories, or Internet news confirms the ubiquitous nature of threats to image. For example, recently we heard and read about several alleged scandals, including J. P. Morgan’s two-billion-dollar loss, General David Petraeus’s affair with Paula Broadwell, Rutgers men’s basketball coach Mike Rice’s abuse of players, and GM’s recall of potentially lethal automobiles. So threats to image, face, or reputation are commonplace in society.

Threats to one’s image, which usually arise from persuasive messages that attack, criticize, or express suspicion and thereby prompt attempts at image repair, are inevitable for at least four reasons. First, the world in which we live and work has limited resources: There is only so much money, equipment, resources, office space, or time. For example, window offices are coveted and corner offices even more so, yet there are more cubicles than window and corner offices. Raise pools are limited, as are opportunities for promotion. We often compete fiercely for these tangible and intangible goods, which means the allocation of these scarce resources often provokes the ire of those who wanted these resources distributed differently. Second, circumstances beyond our control sometimes prevent us from meeting our obligations. We may be delayed by traffic and arrive late to meetings; documents or computer files may become lost or corrupted; or a colleague may neglect to inform us that the time or location of an important meeting has changed. Our behavior is significantly influenced by the people, events, and environment around us, and frequently these factors create problems for us and those who depend on us. Third, human beings are not perfect, and at times we commit wrongdoings, some of which are honest errors, whereas other actions are guided too much by our self-interests. We may forget to bring a report to a meeting or to stop and buy milk on the way home from work; a self-employed individual may send the IRS an insufficient quarterly tax payment; or a contractor may substitute cheaper and inferior parts in a building. Alcohol, drugs, or even lack of sleep may cloud our judgment and hinder performance of our duties. Finally, the fact that human beings are individuals with different sets of priorities fosters conflict among those with competing goals. For example, do we want the most effective prescription drugs (desired by patients) or the least expensive drugs (wanted by insurance companies)? Should a country’s leader focus more time and energy on domestic issues (e.g., job creation) or foreign concerns (e.g., national security)? How do we balance protecting society from criminals with preserving rights of those accused of crimes? How do we balance cost and access to as well as quality of health care? So four factors combine to ensure that actual or perceived wrongdoing is a recurrent feature of human activity.

When such inevitable (apparent) misbehavior occurs, others are very likely to attack, berate, blame, censure, condemn, rail against, rebuke, reproach, or object to us and our behavior. They may complain about things we said or did, they may carp about things left unsaid or undone, or they might criticize the way in which we performed an action or phrased an utterance. Indeed, the simple fact that our language is rich in synonyms for accuse is an indication of the ubiquity of complaints or persuasive attack. Persuasive attacks are messages that attempt to create unfavorable attitudes about a target (person or organization), and these messages have been investigated in several studies (e.g., Benoit & Delbert, 2010; Benoit & Dorries, 1996; Benoit & Harthcock, 1999; Benoit, Klyukovski, McHale, & Airne, 2001; Benoit & Stein, 2009).

These attacks on our reputation are serious matters, for our image or reputation is extremely vital to us. Face, image, or reputation contributes to a healthy self-image. Others may shun us, taunt us, or mistreat us in other ways when they believe we have committed a wrongful act. We can feel embarrassed and even depressed when we become aware that others think we have engaged in wrongdoing. A damaged reputation can hurt our persuasiveness, because credibility generally and trustworthiness in particular are important to persuasion (e.g., Benoit & Benoit, 2008; Benoit & Strathman, 2004), and credibility can be impaired by fallout from actual or perceived wrongdoing. We may be liable to punishment such as fines or jail time for our misdeeds. Although organizations, including companies, may not feel embarrassed, officers, workers, and shareholders do have feelings, and those feelings can be hurt when their organization is the target of accusations. Furthermore, in the private sector, other companies or organizations may take their business elsewhere when a company has a tarnished reputation. For example, Rush Limbaugh attacked Sandra Fluke on his talk show. Carusone (2013) reported, “It’s been one year since Rush Limbaugh’s invective-filled tirade against then-Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke. With hundreds of advertisers and millions of dollars lost, the business of right-wing radio is suffering.” People and companies jealously guard their reputations and work hard to repair tarnished images. Hence, attacks on one’s image can be very serious concerns, and most people recognize the importance of these threats to reputation.

Those who believe that their face or reputation has been injured or even threatened rarely ignore these perils. When our image is threatened, we usually feel compelled to offer explanations, defenses, justifications, rationalizations, apologies, or excuses for our behavior. This book investigates verbal responses to perceived damage to reputation—image repair strategies—because threats to image are pervasive, reputation is important, and discourse has the potential to mend our face or reputation. This first chapter provides a backdrop for the remainder of this book.

Defensive utterances (justifications, excuses, apologies—i.e., image repair) are persuasive attempts to reshape the audience’s attitudes, creating or changing beliefs about the accused’s responsibility for an act and/or creating or changing values about the offensiveness of those acts. I distinguish image repair discourse from crisis communication, a broader category. Figure 1.1 illustrates how image repair discourse fits into crisis communication, communication generally, and human behavior. Human behavior includes both physical acts and communication. Communication includes a variety of contexts, including health communication, political communication, and crisis communication. Crisis communication includes image repair discourse, but it also includes messages about other kinds of crises, such as natural disasters and terrorism. The theory of image repair discourse focuses exclusively on messages designed to improve images tarnished by criticism and suspicion (it is also possible to try to preempt anticipated criticism).

This book updates the theory of image repair discourse (originally referred to as the theory of image restoration discourse) with discussion of developments since the first edition was published in 1995. The case studies in this book are all new, and it extends this theory in several directions. I begin here with an overview, discussing the nature of communication, and then I proceed with addressing the nature of persuasive communication, introducing the idea of persuasive attack, and providing an initial treatment of image repair.

Figure 1.1. Communication, crisis communication, and image repair.

The Nature of Communication

Communication can be viewed as a process in which a source sends a message or messages to an audience or audiences. Of course, at times communication is an interaction where two (or more) sources exchange messages or interact in a conversation, and image repair can occur in such situations; however, in mass media situations, most often a sender disseminates a message to an audience. The source is almost always interested in learning how the audience reacts (getting some feedback in some form from the intended audience), but these mass media situations are not interactive in the same way as a conversation. Furthermore, at times even dyadic communication or conversations can be usefully understood as one person (who can be considered a source) who is trying to persuade another person (who can be thought of as an audience). The fact that both of the participants can send messages and receive messages as an audience does not invalidate the perspective of a source sending a message to a receiver as long as we keep this duality in mind as we investigate these persuasive attempts.

Communication is vital because most of our knowledge is acquired through communication rather than from direct experience. For example, as early as the 1940s, Hayakawa (1948) explained, “Most of our knowledge, acquired from parents, friends, schools, newspapers, books, conversation, speeches, and radio, is received verbally. All of our knowledge of history, for example, comes to us only in words” (p. 15). For example, most people have heard of the current U.S. president, but few have met or talked with the president, and most, if not all, of what we know about the president has come from messages rather than from direct experience. Similarly, in the scandals mentioned earlier, almost no one learned about the image problems of J. P. Morgan, General Petraeus, or Mike Rice from their own direct experience with these scandals. Communication is absolutely vital as a way to change others’ attitudes about us.

It is important to stress that both message sources and audiences operate on their own individual perceptions of the world and the people, things, and ideas in the world. The person (or organization) who seeks to repair a damaged image does so because he or she believes (or has a perception) that an important audience holds an unfavorable attitude. Of course, if the audience really has an unfavorable attitude, the source’s perception of an unfavorable attitude is appropriately based on the audience’s perceptions. But it is also possible that I could believe that an audience thinks badly of me even if they do not—or I could be unaware of an audience’s unfavorable attitudes toward me. Similarly, when one constructs an image repair message, one does so based on perceptions of the audience’s beliefs and values. These perceptions may or may not reflect an accurate understanding of the audience’s perceptions, but those perceptions are what the persuader has to work with to create a persuasive message. One cannot look “inside” the audience’s heads to determine their “real” attitudes, and we must realize that persuaders and audiences operate based on their perceptions or misperceptions about reality.

Often our perceptions overlap; this overlap in perceptions is what makes communication possible. However, people do not share every belief. For example, some people express doubt that President Obama was born in the United States, although that group is in the minority. Nor does everyone share the same values: Is the idea of providing health care to every American a good one or a bad one? This is why meaning resides in people, not in words or other symbols (Berlo, 1960). We use symbols in our messages in hopes of eliciting in the audience the ideas we wish to convey to them. In other words, we believe that the audience attaches the same meaning to a symbol as we do, so using that symbol in a message should evoke in the audience the meaning we want them to experience. However, poor message design or differences in the perceptions (beliefs and values) between the source and the audience can create misunderstanding. This means the person or organization attempting to repair an image must understand the audience’s perceptions—and try to create the most effective message to persuade that audience. The fact that we often have similar meanings for symbols makes communication possible; the fact that we occasionally have different meanings for symbols makes miscommunication a possibility as well.

Ultimately, meaning arises from reality, but humans and their symbols give meaning to reality. A source can, potentially, persuade an audience that road salt is good (it melts ice and makes driving less dangerous) or bad (it damages cars). The “meaning” of road salt is not inherent in the salt but arises in people from their experiences with it, including messages from others about road salt. However, we are constrained by the nature of reality. If there is an object between us with a flat top and four legs, I could probably convince you that it was a desk or a table. However, unless you were impaired by alcohol or drugs, I could not expect to convince you that this thing was a car, a duck, or made entirely of water. Burke (1984) writes about the “recalcitrance” of reality. Communication is powerful, but reality imposes some limitations on what communication is capable of doing. If I am holding a sapphire gem, I might be able to get you to agree it is blue, azure, or indigo, but probably not black, yellow, or green. The recalcitrance of reality is a feature that limits all forms of communication, including image repair discourse. Furthermore, I believe that trying to convince an audience of something that is untrue (something the source believes is untrue) is unethical, and I would never recommend lying in a message. Furthermore, because the audience may know or learn the truth, lying is risky as well as wrong. Because image repair discourse is a form of communication, we must understand the nature of communication before we can understand image repair.

The Nature of Persuasion

Persuasion is communication that attempts to change, create, or strengthen attitudes. Attitudes are cognitions or thoughts that are developed through direct experience and communication (no attitudes are inborn) and influence our behavior. Attitudes have two components: beliefs (“facts”; descriptions of people, objects, and events) and values (favorable or unfavorable evaluations). Fishbein and Ajzen’s theory of reasoned action (2010) discusses beliefs and values (see also Benoit & Benoit, 2008). In order to have an attitude, we must have both components: a belief and a relevant value. For example, we know that Mitt Romney is a Republican (a belief), and most people either like Republican ideology (a positive value) or dislike Republican ideology (a negative value). Therefore people are inclined to have a favorable attitude toward Romney if they like Republican ideology or a negative attitude toward Romney if they dislike Republican ideology. On the other hand, if we like Republican ideology but do not know whether a particular candidate is a Republican, we cannot have an attitude toward that candidate. Similarly, if we know a certain candidate is a Republican but we have no political party preference (do not have either a positive or negative value about Republicans), we cannot have an attitude toward that candidate. So we must have both a belief and a relevant value to have an attitude.

We know several things about some attitude objects (people, organizations, events) and have values about those beliefs, which means that many attitudes comprise multiple relevant belief/value pairs. For example, a person’s attitude toward Bill Clinton can be based on a number of beliefs including the following:

• Bill Clinton was president of the United States for two terms.

• Bill Clinton is a Democrat.

• Bill Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA).

• Bill Clinton signed the Brady Bill with a waiting period for handgun purchases.

• Bill Clinton is married to Hillary Rodham Clinton.

• Bill Clinton had an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

• Bill Clinton had a dog named Buddy.

A person’s beliefs combine with his or her values to form an attitude. Different audience members can (and usually do) have a variety of belief/value pairs. For example, one person may like dogs, whereas another one may dislike canines; this difference would incline the former to have a more positive attitude toward Clinton and the latter to have a more negative attitude. Or one person may, in addition to the previous beliefs, know that Bill Clinton had a cat named Socks; this belief would influence that individual’s attitudes if he or she also had a value related to cats. Yet another person might know that Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton have a daughter name Chelsea. Some beliefs are associated with favo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Communication, Persuasion, and Image Repair
• Chapter 2: Image Repair Theory
• Chapter 3: Corporate Image Repair
• Chapter 4: Political Image Repair
• Chapter 5: Sports/Entertainment Image Repair
• Chapter 6: International Image Repair
• Chapter 7: Third Party Image Repair
• Chapter 8: Conclusion
• References
• Author Index
• Topic Index
• Back Cover