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Case 1: When one of the world's biggest air carriers, United Airlines, refused to compensate a passenger who was a professional musician for breaking his $3,500 guitar in 2008, he eventually wrote a song about his lengthy but failed negotiations with the company. Then he sang the song on a derogatory music video posted on YouTube in 2009. His protest video ''United Breaks Guitars'' was seen by millions of people in a matter of days, and as a result the case received widespread coverage in both Internet media -blogs, forums and news websites -as well as print and TV. Reacting to the groundswell of adverse publicity, the carrier quickly responded with a settlement offer.Case 2: Clothing company H&M became the subject of an unexpected scandal in New York after a student found bags of its unsold clothes that had been mutilated and dumped in the garbage by store personnel. Shocked that the store trashed the clothes instead of donating them to nearby agencies that would have distributed them to the needy, the student informed the New York Times. When questioned by reporters H&M store representatives were caught off guard and refused to comment. Soon the story found its way onto Twitter, the micro-blogging service. After public outrage quickly spread via social media the company gave their first statement about the ''trashgate'' incident. [1] Case 3: A car dealership in Finland found itself in an awkward situation when a customer read an extremely insulting description of himself among some internal documents. The incensed customer wrote about what had happened on an Internet chat forum, and from there the story spread to the tabloid newspapers. Not only the car dealership, but also officials of the importer of the car brand were pressed by the general media for comment after there were indications that the incident would affect sales.What is significant in these examples of corporate reputational risk is that the messages were quickly spread via the Internet's social media services, that the incidents were then publicized and commented upon by the mass media, and that the negative publicity about the incidents became a threat to both the reputation and business of the companies. Social media as riskSocial media is characterized by interactivity -participants freely send, receive, and process content for use by others. Social media services include social networking, content producing, the distribution of services and websites that are collectively constructed by users (''wikis'' such as Wikipedia), video and photo sharing services (such as YouTube and Flickr), virtual worlds (Second Life), and diary-type websites (''blogs''). From the corporate perspective, the most interesting and most popular social media services include the world's biggest social networking service, Facebook, music and entertainment-focused MySpace, career-oriented LinkedIn, and the network service Twitter, which lets members send out short messages via computer and mobile devices. The popularity of social media makes it a forum that can't be ignor...

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Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to expand knowledge of reputation change as a social process and to explore the implications of a social constructivist view of reputation for the challenge of reputation management. Design/methodology/approach -The authors analyze the main characteristics of a social constructivist view of reputation, and study its implications for the task of reputation management by means of an interpretative arena model of reputation change. Findings -The authors build a framework for analyzing reputation change as dialogical interaction between an organization and active stakeholders. Practical implications -The arena model is a tool for analyzing the task of corporate reputation change management across a variety of contexts. The arena model provides a conceptual tool for making sense of the crucial and intricate challenge of strategic reputation management, which places organizations engaging in struggles and collaborations with the stakeholders in symbolic environments. Originality/value -The arena model is the first framework seeking to bridge the theoretical challenge of social constructivism with the managerial task of reputation change.

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The purpose of the present article is to examine the prevailing model of systematic organizational conflict management from an organizational communicative perspective and to suggest directions for improvement. Particularly the model of conflict management system (CMS) is examined at the macro-level from the novel theoretical perspective of social complexity augmented with an interpretive view of organizational communication. Specifically two models -the dual function of communication and the arena model -are utilized to illustrate weaknesses and points of development in traditional CMS thinking. CMS was found to represent a rather limited vision of contemporary conflict management. It is rooted in a mechanistic view of organizational communication, which, we assert, is problematic from the organizational conflict management perspective, both theoretically and practically. The differences between CMS and social complexity approaches are identified, and a fresh framework for strategic conflict management is introduced.

In recent years, a growing body of literature has emerged from the intersection of complex systems science and organizational communication. However, due to the incoherence and immaturity of complexity science, this body of research is slightly disorganized. This article explores this research node using a meta-paradigmatic framework to untangle and clarify the different paradigmatic assumptions in the field of organizational communication research that has adopted the complexity science perspective. Our analysis revealed five research clusters that differ from each other in their understanding of what complexity is and in how they define communication. Based on our research, we present suggestions for finding common ground and reaching beyond simplistic dichotomies in complexity-based research.