Emergent Agents: The Forgotten Publics in Crisis Communication and Issues Management Research

Abstract

Crisis communication research rarely highlights the voices of marginalized publics or their advocates whose interests are affected by crisis situations. We take a different approach by using a response to a natural disaster to expand our theorizing about crisis situations beyond those that hurt the bottom line. Using official statements from Senators Landrieu and Obama about events surrounding Hurricane Katrina as texts for analysis, we demonstrate how they used transcendence, rhetorically, and appropriated the Bush administration's key term*security*to garner more support for their positions, Katrina sufferers, and relief efforts. Implications of this strategy serve to broaden crisis communication theorizing, and to provide insights into ways to strengthen the quality of crisis emergency response planning and response protocols.Many crises arise when key stakeholders are harmed by organizations' (in)actions, yet, in public relations and crisis communication research and literature, we rarely are exposed to the voices of many ''forgotten'' publics. Almost overwhelmingly, crisis communication research and literature, which are dominated by the managerial perspective, serve as a manual for ways that organizations can handle crises at hand, avoid legal sanctions and punitive damages, and address displeased publics. In such analyses, there is little or no attention to the voices of the affected publics, those whose interests are part or most of the reason why the subject organization is suffering a crisis and in need of responding to public and media inquiry. In this essay, we advance the view that crisis communication research, strategy, and responses will continue to be

History, Healing, and Hope: Reconceptualizing Crisis Renewal

“…McHale et al argued that the linear, prescriptive models dominating current crisis communication literature must give way to more culturally adaptive and descriptive models, an argument supported by others (see Littlefield et al, 2009;Sellnow, Ulmer, Seeger, & Littlefield, 2009;Waymer & Heath, 2007). They purported that their model complemented the field by not locating "all power to respond and to manage a crisis in the organization but also locates it in the audiences and all kinds of institutions that relate to it" (p. 378).…”

“…This project expands the organizational application of renewal theory by using a critical and cultural lens to uncover risk and crisis communication in community settings, particularly marginalized communities, a perspective relatively nonexistent in the literature (for exceptions, see Littlefield, Reierson, Cowden, Stowman, & Long Fellow, 2009;McHale, et al, 2007;Waymer & Heath, 2007). We explore the crisis renewal model's potential for bridging the gap between critical theory and scholarship and risk and crisis communication scholarship.…”

“Why am I to blame when the law is on my side?” A study of crises, public opinion and frames

“…This is backed by recent findings in crisis research, which point to crisis being a community-oriented incident, where multiple voices or discourses contribute to the development and handling of the process instead of it being an exclusively organisation-centred process, where control of the crisis is left in the hands of a small exclusive group of managers and media consultants (cf. Heath, 2010;Waymer and Heath, 2007).…”

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

“…research lacks an insider perspective and relies on analysis of single crisis events (Pauly & Hutchison, 2005;Waymer & Heath, 2007). This study is the first to provide best practices exclusively for communication about crises that involve issues of culture, ethnicity, and/or race from expert crisis managers' perspectives.…”