Frames and framing effects in Chinese online and offline crisis communication: the case study of a celebrity scandal

This study develops a model for analyzing the flow of frames and the multiple levels of framing effects in Chinese crisis communication both online and offline. To investigate the convergence and/or divergence of traditional media and social media in framing a crisis event in China, the study uses the sample of a celebrity scandal case that received extensive attention both online and offline. The empirical findings showed that crisis communicative strategies (CCSs), that is, the frames used in crisis communication, were correlated with those used in newspaper coverage (i.e. frames in representation) but were not correlated with the CCSs used by the online public (i.e. frames in thoughts). Specific and defensive CCSs, such as attacking the accusers and denial, led to fewer favorable responsibility-oriented frames than ambiguous strategies, such as excuses and justification. This finding supports the assumptions of classic situational crisis communication theory. However, none of the above-mentioned CCSs significantly predicted the relationship-oriented frames in thoughts. Relationship-oriented frames were found to be a predictor of the valence of online public opinion whereas no CCS was observed to be influential in the online public opinions expressed by social media users.     

A comparative study of crisis communication strategies between Mainland China and Taiwan: The melamine-tainted milk powder crisis in the Chinese context

The purpose of this paper is twofold: (1) to identify and compare the crisis communication strategies (CCSs) that organizations used to respond to a congenetic melamine-tainted milk crisis in two Chinese societies (i.e., Mainland China and Taiwan), and (2) to explore the underlying political and media system reasons that led to the differences. Content analysis and discourse analysis of media coverage were used. The most significant finding is that Sanlu (a Mainland China-based organization) and KingCar (a Taiwan-based organization) demonstrated inverse pattern of the CCS adoption. Specifically, according to Coombs’ (1998) defense-accommodation continuum, Sanlu's CCSs moved from defensive to accommodative pole as time went by whereas, in contrast, KingCar started with accommodative strategies and moved towards the defensive pole gradually. Besides, the results showed that both organizations adopted denial, corrective action and apology strategies. However, on the Sanlu part, the most frequently used strategy was denial, while KingCar used justification most often. Moreover, this paper suggests that besides cultural dynamics, political and media systems also play a part in corporate selection of CCSs, and they are among the most important factors that should be taken into account to explain the differences in societies even with an identical traditional culture.     

Corporate dialogue in crises of China: Examining dialogic strategies and communicative outcomes in a child abuse scandal

Although dialogue has become a key concept in the field of public relations, little research has dealt with corporate dialogic strategies and communicative outcomes in crises of a non-Western context. Applying a mixed-method approach including both quantitative survey research and qualitative content analysis, this study analyzed both corporate dialogic strategies and public reactions in a social-mediated crisis in mainland China. Results demonstrated the corporation utilized both concertative and transformative dialogic strategies as the crisis progressed. After the crisis, concerned publics perceived low trust and moderate distrust towards the organization and reported five different communicative action intentions (i.e., mobilizing, information seeking, threatening, persuasion, and partnering). Trust and distrust exerted different impacts on publics’ post-crisis communicative action intentions and distrust was a stronger driver. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Crisis perceptions,relationship, and communicative behaviors of employees: Internal public segmentation approach

This study examines when and why employees engage in external communicative behaviors during the periods of a corporate crisis. Combining a cross-situational factor (i.e., pre-crisis relationship quality) and a situational factor (i.e., crisis-specific perceptions), this study segments internal publics to understand employees’ motivations of becoming advocates for or adversaries of their organization. The results of an online survey demonstrated that employees’ pre-crisis relationship to their organization plays a critical role in encouraging them to advocate for their company; meanwhile, their crisis-perception—whether they feel fewer constraints in solving a crisis—is more likely to make them share negative information externally. Segmented groups of employees with high levels of both relationship and activeness are most likely to engage in both positive and negative external communication behaviors. Theoretical and practical implications for public relations and internal crisis communication are suggested.     

Trust and Relational Commitment in Corporate Crises: The Effects of Crisis Communicative Strategy and Form of Crisis Response

The purpose of this article is to examine the extent to which crisis communicative strategy and form of crisis response affect trust and relational commitment with respect to crisis contexts at the firm level, after controlling the effects of crisis type and organizational association. A survey of communication managers, crisis managers, and public relations and/or public affairs managers from Taiwan's top 500 companies was conducted. The results showed that in crisis managers' assessment, the form of crisis response (timely response, consistent response, and active response) is more powerful than crisis communicative strategies (denial, diversion, excuse, justification and concession) in predicting trust and relational commitment. Moreover, the result, on one hand, supports the robustness of concession as an effective communicative strategy above and beyond the impacts from crisis type and organization association. On the other hand, however, it challenges this traditional wisdom involving concession by emphasizing the intriguing mediating role of form of crisis response by demonstrating that form of crisis response is necessary for more concession communicative response to generate more favorable relational outcomes.     

Revisiting the Effectiveness of Base Crisis Response Strategies in Comparison of Reputation Management Crisis Responses

This experimental study found that employing reputation management crisis-response strategies was no better than adopting only the base crisis-response strategy (i.e., instructing and adjusting information) in terms of generating positive responses from the public. Two-sided messages (i.e., sharing both positive and negative information) in crisis communication were found to be more effective than one-sided messages in a victim crisis. In addition, even in a preventable crisis, one-sided messages (i.e., sharing only positive information) were not more effective than two-sided messages. Finally, the study found little support for Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT)'s recommendations for the best crisis response strategy selections.     

Public expectations of crisis outcomes in the social media era in China: A communication-mediated psychological mechanism

This study theoretically and empirically identifies a new typology of Chinese publics’ normative expectations of crisis outcomes. It classifies the concept into three culturally relevant dimensions—public expectations of (a) organizational accommodative responses (i.e., how an in-crisis organization should respond), (b) punishment of the organization (i.e., how publics collectively should respond), and (c) government intervention (i.e., how government should respond) for desirable crisis outcomes. Using an online survey of the Beijing public, this study investigates the degree to which information seeking and online expression mediate relationships between crisis blame and the three types of expectations. The study finds that as the level of crisis blame increases, active information seekers expect more regarding organizational accommodation and government intervention, whereas active expressers expect stronger punishments of the organization and less government intervention in China.     

Explicating crisis coping in crisis communication

This study explores coping, a core construct in the cognitive appraisal theory of crisis communication, from the public's perspective. The study proposed and tested the hierarchical framework of publics’ crisis coping that examined the relationship among four types of publics’ crisis coping strategies (i.e., relational thinking, emotional venting, instrumental support, and action). For this purpose, a survey was conducted among 168 individuals from a randomly sampled general public population. The proposed model of crisis coping illustrates tenable data-model fits. Key findings of this study include direct effects of rational thinking on action as well as indirect effects of emotional venting on action through instrumental support. The results shed light on the essential coping facilitator role organizations could play in terms of providing publics with instrumental support in times of crisis and facilitate more constructive public responses in the organizational crisis-handling process.     

Examining multiplicity and dynamics of publics’ crisis narratives with large-scale Twitter data

The new reality of networked publics on social media calls for crisis communication practitioners and researchers to understand the narratives generated by publics on social media during organizational crises. As social media publics possess diverse, unique characteristics and communicative needs during a crisis, they form interpretative communities and co-create various symbolic interpretations of the crisis. Extending the public-centric and narrative perspective to the context of social media crises, we examined what crisis narratives were constructed by social media publics (i.e., multiplicity) and how these narratives changed by crisis stages (i.e., dynamics). Using topic modelling based on large-scale Twitter data of the Chipotle E. coli crisis (N?=?40,610), we identified ten narratives subsumed under two themes (i.e., sharing-based and conversation-based) based on publics’ social constructions of their perceived risks and crisis experience. On the one hand, sharing-based narratives, heavily impacted by publics’ shared media coverage, reflected media crisis narratives and salient risk perceptions aligning with the news agenda. On the other hand, conversation-based narratives, fueled by publics’ opinion expression and emotional venting, demonstrated publics’ interpretations of their experience with the organization in the crisis with less salient but more diversified risk perceptions. Crisis managers are recommended to produce and deliver compelling narratives resonating with different groups of social media publics during crises.     

The origins of distant voicing: Examining relational dimensions in public diplomacy and their effects on megaphoning

Extant literature has discussed the similarities between public relations and public diplomacy. This study seeks to contribute to existing research on the application of organization–public relationships (OPR) to public diplomacy by further exploring relational dimensions in public diplomacy and empirically testing them based on a model consisting of antecedents (i.e., political, economic, interpersonal, cultural and corporate interactions), relational dimensions (i.e., interactional bilateralism, power mutuality, trust, empathy, relational satisfaction, relational continuation, relational attentiveness and relational curiosity), and consequences (i.e., positive and negative megaphoning). A total of 490 respondents from the United States were recruited on Amazon M-Turk to respond to survey items regarding China and Mexico. Confirmatory factor analysis and regression analysis were conducted. The findings indicate: (a) positive associations between the antecedents and the relational dimensions, (b) positive associations between the relational dimensions and positive megaphoning, and (c) negative associations between the relational dimensions and negative megaphoning. (148 words)     

The Function of Acculturation and Collective Self-Esteem on Prejudicial Attitudes among Vietnamese American Young Adults

ABSTRACT

This study examined the influence of collective self-esteem and acculturation on prejudicial attitudes in a sample of Vietnamese American young adults. A total of 122 college students from a public university in Southern California were given the Collective Self-Esteem Scale, the Vietnamese Acculturation Scale, and the Quick Discrimination Index. Results suggest that students who were more involved in U.S. culture and had both higher public collective self-esteem (i.e., the belief that their cultural groups were perceived positively by others) and higher private collective self-esteem (i.e., the individuals' private evaluation about their cultural groups) tended to have fewer prejudicial attitudes. Interestingly, results also reveal that students who were more involved in Vietnamese culture and had higher membership collective self-esteem (i.e., the belief in how well they perform in their cultural groups) tended to have more prejudicial attitudes. The implications of the findings are discussed.     

Studying Crisis Communication From the Subaltern Studies Framework: Grassroots Activism in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina

The dominant crisis communication literature has 3 limitations: its managerial bias, functionalistic orientation, and the erasure of marginalized voices by focusing on restituting the status quo. Due to these limitations, studies that aim to understand crisis experiences, interpretive processes, and communicative responses of the politically less powerful and resource-poor are scarce in the crisis communication literature. Drawing upon the subaltern studies literature, this article suggests an alternative approach (i.e., the subaltern studies framework) to aid crisis communication researchers to (a) expand the scope of the literature to nonmanagerial contexts, (b) speak to the discursive nature of crisis communication, and (c) attend to the issues of structure and agency in the interpretations of and responses to crises. A case study of grassroots activism in New Orleans is presented to illustrate how the application of the subaltern studies framework can provide a theoretical entry point for conceptualizing crisis communication from below and for facilitating academic self-reflexivity in crisis communication scholarship.     

Disentangling social media influence in crises: Testing a four-factor model of social media influence with large data

Social media empower publics by providing a platform for their voices during crises. Digital-enabled platforms allow individuals to become influentials by sharing their insights and expertise with others. Confronted with the fast-paced and complex dynamics of crises, we lack a systematic conceptualization and a valid measure of social media influence in the crisis context. By integrating diverse perspectives on influence, we propose a new framework that theorizes different dimensions of social media influence based on publics’ communicative behaviors during crises. This integrated framework offers a refined conceptualization and measurement of social media influence in crises by incorporating the network perspective. We tested the framework with large-scale Twitter data from four crises. Results from multigroup CFA on Twitter influencers suggest that social media influence is composed of four factors: output, reactive outtake, proactive outtake, and network positioning. Each factor is associated with a distinct set of users’ behavioral indicators (e.g., retweet). Implications for crisis communication and public relations are discussed.     

Is the medium the message? Perceptions of and reactions to crisis communication via twitter, blogs and traditional media

Value changes and the rapid emergence of media innovations (internet, social web) in society lead to an institutionalization of crisis communication, in which especially new media play a crucial role. The key contributions of the paper include deepening and refocusing the theoretical foundations of crisis communication by experimentally analyzing the effects of traditional and social-media strategies on the recipients’ perceptions of reputation; and by analyzing the effects or crisis responses on the recipients’ secondary crisis communications (e.g., sharing information and leaving a message) and reactions (e.g., willingness to boycott). The results indicated that the medium matters more than the message. For all three dependent measures - reputation, secondary crisis communication and reactions - main effects of medium occurred, whereas the message had only a significant main effect on secondary crisis reactions.     

A Preliminary Analysis of Associations Among Ethnic–Racial Socialization,Ethnic Discrimination,and Ethnic Identity Among Urban Sixth Graders

Drawing from cultural ecological models of adolescent development, the present research investigates how early adolescents received ethnic–racial socialization from parents as well as how experiences of ethnic and racial discrimination are associated with their ethnic identity (i.e., centrality, private regard, and public regard). Data for this study were drawn from a multimethod study of ethnically and socioeconomically diverse early adolescents in three mid‐ to high‐achieving schools in New York City. After accounting for the influences of race/ethnicity, social class, gender, immigrant status, and self‐esteem, parental ethnic–racial socialization was associated with higher levels of ethnic centrality (i.e., the extent to which youth identify themselves in terms of their group), more positive private regard (i.e., feelings about one's own ethnic group), and public regard (i.e., perceptions of other people's perceptions of their ethnic group). Ethnic discrimination from adults at school and from peers was associated with more negative perceptions of one's ethnic group (i.e., public regard). In addition, the association of ethnic–racial parent socialization and ethnic identity beliefs was stronger for those who reported higher levels of adult discrimination. Results highlight key ways in which ethnic identity may be shaped by the social ecologies in which adolescents are embedded.     

Does Race Matter? Implicit and Explicit Measures of the Effect of the PR Spokesman's Race on Evaluations of Spokesman Source Credibility and Perceptions of a PR Crisis' Severity

One rationale offered for why there are fewer people of color in public relations is that publics would respond less positively if racial minorities represented the public face of an organization. To determine the plausibility of this rationale, this study employed a 2 (race: Black vs. White spokesman) × 2 (performance history: with prior crisis vs. no prior crisis) × 2 (crisis type: sports vs. product recall) within-subjects experiment (N = 64), using both implicit (reaction time) and explicit (self-report) measures. Contrary to expectations, participants rated Black spokesmen as significantly more credible than White spokesmen using explicit measures. Most significantly, implicit tests, using response time measures, revealed that heuristic cues, such as the spokesman's race, have an influence on perceptions in the absence of a performance history, i.e., when no other information must be cognitively processed. But in cases where there is a crisis history, i.e., when there is more pertinent information, racial cues play less of a role.     

Differing conceptions of the causes of the economic crisis: Effects of culture,economic training,and personal impact

We report findings from a survey regarding the lay perception of the causes of the worldwide economic and financial crisis. Respondents (N = 2245) from a variety of countries were included: China (Hong Kong), Turkey, Russia, Israel, Germany, USA, and France. We have previously documented a range of factors that affects lay understanding of the crisis The present study expanded the database and focuses on the combination of factors that jointly predict whether the respondents view the crisis as a complex impersonal system that malfunctioned, or hold a moral/intentional view about its origins. We show that respondents from Western World countries, who were unaffected by the crisis and have economic training, interpret the crisis differently from all other respondents (i.e., those living in Turkey, Russia, or Hong Kong, and those who were personally affected by the crisis or without economic training). These differences have important implications on how policies are perceived and evaluated by the public, and should inform how they are presented to the public.     

Integrating public relations and legal responses during a crisis: The case of Odwalla, Inc.

Crisis management is a form of issues management in which crisis managers attempt to control the terms used to describe corporate actions. In this sense, a crisis can be seen as an opportunity to demonstrate the organization's commitment to responsible behavior and to outline the steps being taken to eliminate the problem. The organization's decision-making process is evident in its communication response (public relations versus legal) strategies.This study examines the crisis communication strategies employed by Odwalla, Inc. during its juice contamination crisis, a crisis whose impact on public health and safety gave it the potential for developing into an issue that required public policy relief. An analysis of the content of published responses made by Odwalla officials showed that public relations response strategies dominated legal response strategies throughout the crisis, followed by mixed public relations and legal strategies. This case provides a clear example of the collaborative approach to crisis management in terms of legal versus public relations strategies. In addition, Odwalla exerted control over the crisis through its recall, the development of a process to eliminate the problem, and raising the issue of pasteurization.     

It is time that matters in crisis communication: The role of temporal distance and crisis threat appraisal

The present study advances scholarly understanding of publics’ crisis responses by examining a potential role of temporal crisis distance and crisis threat appraisal from the perspective of publics. It explored whether and how temporal distance from the influence of crises (proximal future vs. distant future) might predict threat appraisal components (i.e., situational demands and required resources) and publics’ crisis responses (i.e., crisis emotions and supportive behavioral intentions). This study tested the mediation model to explicate how temporal crisis distance affected crisis responses through crisis threat appraisal. The results revealed that temporal crisis distance significantly predicted publics’ perception of situational demands, which in turn influenced crisis responses. Theoretical and practical implications for crisis communication are discussed.     

Filmic public relations for a global audience: The United Nations and The Blue Vanguard

The project investigates the use of documentary film as a public relations tool by the United Nations (UN) for worldwide promotion of its first peacekeeping intervention in response to the Suez crisis of 1956. Specifically, it undertakes a historical investigation into the communicative purpose of the 1957 documentary film, The Blue Vanguard, which was made by the UN Department of Public Information (UNDPI). Beyond the interest connected with the intervention in the Suez crisis, the film is significant in the history of the UN’s global public relations since it was one of the first films made for the UN by UK film director, Thorold Dickinson, who arrived as Chief of Film at the UN in October 1956.The author argues that Thorold Dickinson used the documentary to make a radical public information proposition to a global audience on behalf of the United Nations. Specifically, the public relations discourse and cinematicity in The Blue Vanguard reminded a global audience that achieving peace required a new level of cultural tolerance and global co-operation, involving codes of judgement beyond the nationalistically-determined registers of the time.