The Incident: Not Just Another Organizational Disruption

Hayes, Rebecca A.; Smudde, Peter M.

doi:10.1080/1062726x.2015.1086652

Cited by 5 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…A crisis may activate an issue if the issue is not managed successfully, and the issue may develop into a new crisis if not properly managed (Smudde, 2001). Issues also must be addressed in a more systematic, proactive, and strategic way than most crises (Hayes & Smudde, 2015).…”

Section: Campaign Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Diffusion Of Innovations And Public Communication Campaigns: An Examination Of The 4r Nutrient Stewardship Program

Seeger¹

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Water is necessary for life, and fertilizer runoff from agricultural sites can result in the contamination of water systems. This contamination can be a significant health risk for any population depending on those systems. To protect the public, it is necessary to limit fertilizer runoff. This may be achieved in part by persuading farmers to adopt innovative fertilizer management practices. This project examines the 4R Nutrient Stewardship Program, a public communication campaign seeking to encourage changes in fertilizer application behaviors with the goal of reducing runoff. The campaign was created and is operated by the Fertilizer Institute, a multistate trade association, in cooperation with the International Plant Nutrient Institute. This campaign is operated primarily to prevent the introduction of new policies regulating fertilizer use. Because this campaign constitutes an industry response to potential adverse policy creation, it is appropriate to regard the 4R Nutrient Stewardship Program as a strategic issues management campaign. The focus of this investigation is the 4R Nutrient Stewardship Program's effort to persuade Ohio farmers living and working within the area of the Maumee River Watershed to adopt new practices. The Maumee River Watershed is a critical water system in Ohio that drains 5,024 square miles and flows through all or part of 18 Ohio counties (Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, 2018a). The 4R Nutrient Stewardship Program is approached as an issues management campaign targeted to farmers, fertilizer retailers, policymakers, and policy advocates. This examination is informed by diffusion of innovations theory (DOI), a framework describing the process whereby a community adopts a new innovation (Rogers, 2003). When a public communication campaign seeks to encourage behavioral change, the principles of DOI can directly inform campaign design and analysis. By illustrating the process of diffusion, DOI can answer questions about how strategic messaging decisions influence behavioral change across targeted populations. In some cases, the diffusion of an innovation may serve as strategy for managing issues faced by an organization or an industry. The goal of this project is to demonstrate the utility of DOI in case studies of public communication campaigns seeking to encourage behavioral change within target audiences. Doing so will broaden the utility of this theory in a way that will inform both campaign scholarship and design. Findings from this research will be useful in design for future campaigns seeking to change fertilizer application behaviors to protect water systems. To demonstrate the utility of DOI in these contexts, survey data collected from farmers within the Maumee River Watershed in Ohio are used to examine the 4R Nutrient Stewardship Program campaign. The survey data were collected by The Ohio State University's College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences and is used here with permission. The data are analyzed to determine rates of understanding about 4R inn...

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Section: Campaign Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Diffusion Of Innovations And Public Communication Campaigns: An Examination Of The 4r Nutrient Stewardship Program

Seeger¹

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“…Crises and disasters regularly yet unpredictably occur, but not all rise to the level of tragedy, which is a concept not readily defined in the public relations or organizational communication literature, with most scholarship assuming an understanding of tragedy as it is colloquially known: as a ‘very bad event that causes great suffering and often involves someone’s death’ (Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 2016). However, the broad range of disruptive situations is important for organizations to recognize, from the relatively simple ‘incident’ to the enormously complex ‘crisis’, to inform for scholarship and practice (see Hayes and Smudde, 2015). Here, the crisis and disaster literature is directly relevant, as it can frame our understanding and expectations regarding the processes of tragedies and their place in that range.…”

Section: The Range Of Disruptive Situationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The simplest disruptive situations are incidents, which are ‘a small, localized, and internal or external disruptions to organizations’ operations that pose little to no threat but still require immediate attention’ (Hayes and Smudde, 2015: 426). At the other end of the existing spectrum are organizational crises.…”

Section: The Range Of Disruptive Situationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An organizational crisis can be defined as ‘a specific, unexpected, and nonroutine event or series of events that create high levels of uncertainty and simultaneously present an organization with both opportunities for and threats to its high-priority goals’ (Ulmer et al, 2015: 8). In between incidents and crises are issues, which are ‘problems ready for resolution’ (Coombs, 2012: 54), ‘develop systematically over time through public argumentation between an organization and interested stakeholders until it is resolved’, and ‘if left unaddressed, will have an impact on the continued operation of an organization’ (Hayes and Smudde, 2015: 418). Because of their extraordinary import and impact, organizational crises encompass many unexpected events, including disasters, such as airplane crashes or earthquakes, or organizational misdeeds, such as malfeasance by someone in power (Lerbinger, 1997).…”

Section: The Range Of Disruptive Situationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The type of event one is facing influences the response the organization should formulate (Hayes and Smudde, 2015). Coombs (2014) distills varying crisis typologies into a ‘master list’ (p. 67).…”

Section: The Range Of Disruptive Situationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims: Explicating the public tragedy as a public relations challenge

Hayes

Waddell

Smudde

2017

Public Relations Inquiry

Self Cite

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A tragedy is substantively different than an organizational crisis. Tragedies, whether man-made or natural disasters, have a considerably greater and singular impact than a traditional industry crisis, and current typologies of crises fail to account for organizations being impacted by and being obligated to respond to events of which they are neither the victim nor the perpetrator. Thus, tragedies require explication and, possibly, a different paradigm for public relations and crisis communication, both in industry response and academic scholarship. The goals of this article are threefold: First, use interdisciplinary scholarship to introduce and define the concept of public tragedy within the scope of public relations and crisis communication. Second, to discuss the motivations for and role of organizational involvement in the conversation surrounding a public tragedy, particularly for third-party organizations not directly impacted by an event, including the consequences and affordances of social media in tragedy response. Finally, the goal is to present recommendations for third-party public relations involvement in a tragedy.

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Improving crisis-response simulations: Using local context and incorporating crisis-response professionals

Gilbert

Youngquist

2020

Communication Teacher

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The Incident: Not Just Another Organizational Disruption

Cited by 5 publications

References 19 publications

Diffusion Of Innovations And Public Communication Campaigns: An Examination Of The 4r Nutrient Stewardship Program

Diffusion Of Innovations And Public Communication Campaigns: An Examination Of The 4r Nutrient Stewardship Program

Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims: Explicating the public tragedy as a public relations challenge

Improving crisis-response simulations: Using local context and incorporating crisis-response professionals

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