Organizational research has long been interested in crises and crisis management. Whether focused on crisis antecedents, outcomes, or managing a crisis, research has revealed a number of important findings. However, research in this space remains fragmented, making it difficult for scholars to understand the literature’s core conclusions, recognize unsolved problems, and navigate paths forward. To address these issues, we propose an integrative framework of crises and crisis management that draws from research in strategy, organizational theory, and organizational behavior as well as from research in public relations and corporate communication. We identify two primary perspectives in the literature, one focused on the internal dynamics of a crisis and one focused on managing external stakeholders. We review core concepts from each perspective and highlight the commonalities that exist between them. Finally, we use our integrative framework to propose future research directions for scholars interested in crises and crisis management.
We use content analysis to examine the content analysis literature in organization studies. Given the benefits of content analysis, it is no surprise that its use in organization studies has been growing in the course of the past 25 years (Erdener & Dunn, 1990;Jauch, Osborn, & Martin 1980). First, we review the principles and the advantages associated with the method. Then, we assess how the methodology has been applied in the literature in terms of research themes, data sources, and methodological refinements. Although content analysis has been applied to research topics across the subdomains of management research, research in strategy and managerial cognition have yielded particularly interesting results. We conclude with suggestions for enhancing the utility of content analytic methods in organization studies.
We contribute to research on the management of social perceptions by considering the relative effectiveness of a firm's technical and ceremonial actions in managing media coverage after its own or its competitors' wrongdoing. We examine these relationships in the context of product recalls by U.S. toy companies over the ten-year period 1998-2007. As hypothesized, firms with higher levels of wrongdoing experience less positive media coverage; however, this decline is mitigated during periods of higher industry wrongdoing. Additionally, we find support for a negative spillover effect: the tenor of media coverage about a focal firm is less positive if others in its industry recall products. Further, technical actions help firms attenuate the negative effect of their own wrongdoing on the tenor of media coverage, whereas ceremonial actions amplify this effect. In contrast, ceremonial actions are more effective in attenuating the negative effect of industry wrongdoing on the tenor of media coverage about a focal firm. Information intermediaries-third parties such as the media, financial analysts, regulators, and consumer organizations-disseminate information, frame issues, and assist stakeholders in making sense of firm actions. By influencing stakeholders' perceptions about a firm, these infomediaries
We propose a four-stage model of the organizational actions that potentially increase the speed and likelihood that an organization will restore its legitimacy with stakeholders following a transgression. Organizations that work to discover the facts of the transgression, provide an appropriate explanation of their wrongdoing, accept and serve an equitable punishment, and make consistent internal and external rehabilitative changes increase the likelihood of meeting stakeholder demands and, consequently, have a higher probability of successfully achieving reintegration with stakeholders than those that do not. We thank Lauri Grunig, Debra Shapiro, Matthew Seger, Robert Ulmer, three anonymous AMR reviewers, and special issue editor Blake Ashforth for their comments and insights on earlier drafts of this paper. 1 While the steps to reintegration for both illegal and unethical behaviors are very similar, we recognize they may not be identical, depending on the organization, its stakeholders' expectations, and the transgression itself. We thank
Cross-sector partnerships (XSPs) are an important part of today's organizational landscape and a favored strategy for addressing complex social problems. However, a discrepancy exists between the popularity and prevalence of XSPs and evidence of their ability to produce value with respect to the problems they address. We therefore offer a framework for increasing and assessing XSP value based on an alternative conception of organizational constitution rooted in communication theory. Our central argument is that the overall value of XSPs is not merely in connecting interested parties but, rather, in their ability to act-to substantially influence the people and issues within their problem domain. This ability, we argue, comes from the constitution of organizational forms that are distinct from their members and that display collective agency-the capacity to influence a host of relevant outcomes beyond what individual organizations could do on their own. Our primary contributions are developing a framework for understanding XSP constitution in terms of communication processes and explaining how XSP value can be increased and assessed through communication practices. Addressing complex social issues such as poverty, crime, economic development, and public health cannot be managed by any single entity; increasingly, such problems require collaboration across multiple organizations (Selsky & Parker, 2005). These cross-sector partnerships (XSPs)-involving businesses, government, and civil society groups-make up a unique form of social organization. XSPs are multilateral collectives that engage in mutual problem solving, information sharing, and resource allocation
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