Effective Public Relations in Racially Charged Crises: Not Black or White

The crisis with no name: Defining the interplay of culture, ethnicity, and race on organizational issues and media outcomes

“…Although this more systematic approach is an improvement on Baker's (2001) simplified categories of crisis management response, we contend that both Baker's (2001) and Liu's (2010) approaches fall prey to ''managerial bias'' (Heath, 2010, p. 7) since researchers may oversimplify and overgeneralize complex issue outcomes out of context.…”

“…As per the second category, only Baker (2001) offered a management framework, suggesting that organizations should strategically respond to offensive actions, apologize and swiftly dissociate themselves from those responsible for any offensive words and modify offensive symbols despite any financial losses. Yet, Liu (2010) called Baker's (2001) framework too general and lacking in applied strategies for racially charged crisis response*and instead recommended applying situational crisis communication theory, as discussed below. A third group of studies involving culture, ethnicity, and/or race crisis management grows dated and almost exclusively focuses on US Hispanics/Latino/as and African Americans/blacks.…”

“…To integrate culture, ethnicity, and race research with crisis communication theory, Liu (2010) recommended applying situational crisis communication theory to help organizations minimize reputational threat and other damage via responses of: denial, diminishment, rebuilding, and bolstering. Although this more systematic approach is an improvement on Baker's (2001) simplified categories of crisis management response, we contend that both Baker's (2001) and Liu's (2010) approaches fall prey to ''managerial bias'' (Heath, 2010, p.…”

“…In a chapter in the Handbook of Crisis Communication Research, Liu (2010) summarized the extant research on racially charged crises into two categories:…”

Crisis in the air: An investigation of AirAsia’s crisis-response effectiveness based on frame alignment

“…The response strategies (Deny, Diminish, Rebuild, and Reinforce) were operationalised according to the theoretical construct of the SCCT (Coombs, 2007b;Liu, 2010). However, since this case has not been researched in the context of crisis communication, the Base response option Adjusting information was newly operationalised.…”