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This study investigates the processes that the US universities and colleges used to learn during the COVID-19 pandemic and the factors that facilitated and impeded their learning processes.

To address this study’s research questions, this study used a crisis communication and learning lens to interview crisis response team members from 30 US higher education institutions in May 2020 (the first pandemic semester). In October 2020 (the second pandemic semester), this study conducted follow-up interviews with 25 of the original interviewees. Overall, this study conducted 55 interviews.

Learning during the COVID-19 pandemic is facilitated by a recognition of a serious deficiency in the current system and impeded by the need to act quickly. The findings demonstrate the process by which decisions, actions and strategies emerged during crises.

This investigation illustrates how crises can prompt organizational learning while demonstrating the critical role of internal and external resources in the learning process.

Testing technologies for policing is costly and laborious. Previous research found that police can be reticent about technology adoption. The purpose of this paper is to examine law enforcement adoption of programmatic innovations focused on particular crime types (radiological and nuclear threats).

First, an expert police panel explored readiness to adopt an advanced technology (personal radiation detectors (PRDs)). A survey was then developed from the panel findings (n=101 sampled from East Coast metropolitan police).

Results indicated that on-duty device adoption was likely, but not off-duty. In addition, concerns about ease of carrying PRDs, personal health and security issues, and concerns about job performance were raised. Furthermore, findings suggest that police respond negatively to financial incentives, and focus instead on how innovations can contribute to their own safety and that of their immediate families. Additionally, results indicate that false positives are not a significant barrier to adoption, but device training is important.

This work gives insight how to engage officers more meaningfully in technology adoption for benefit of policing in the field.

This work expands previous police adoption literature and advances understanding of the increasing role officers are taking in counter-terrorism efforts in the USA with applications around the world.

The purpose of this study is to refine and expand an emerging US government communication model, the government communication decision wheel, by testing the differences between the communication practices of US public sector communicators working for non‐elected officials versus those employed by elected officials.

Drawing from surveys of 781 US government communicators, the study compares the communication practices and influences of government communicators working for elected officials versus non‐elected officials.

The study identifies four significant differences and five similarities in how the public sector environment affects non‐elected and elected officials’ communicators’ public relations practices.

While the study and underlying model focus on US government communication, this study provides valuable theoretical insights. It supports the model's underlying premise that the public sector is unique from the private sector while also further refining the significant differences within the US government sector.

This study helps US government communicators identify unique environmental attributes that affect communication activities in the public sector. It helps identify how these attributes affect communication practices within individual and collaborative contexts. Finally, it helps non‐governmental communicators and communicators outside of the US to understand how the attributes may affect communication practices when they collaborate with government communicators from the four levels of US government as well as with those who work for elected and non‐elected officials.

Despite the critical importance of communication in the public sector, very little research focuses specifically on government communication outside of political communication. The findings provide valuable insights for practitioners and contribute to public relations theory development for the under‐researched public sector.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate whether the media's disaster coverage reflects the messages disseminated by state emergency management agencies (SEMAs).

SEMAs were selected as the unit of analysis because the 2008 National Response Framework designates SEMAs with primary responsibility for managing disaster planning and coordinating the inter‐governmental response to disasters. Specifically, this study identifies ten disaster frames SEMAs use through a qualitative content analysis of all the media releases distributed by three SEMAs (n=303) during a two‐year time frame. It then evaluates whether the coverage reflects SEMA's frames through a quantitative content analysis of 1,088 newspaper articles.

Taken as a whole, the research indicates that framing allows the media to efficiently tell disaster stories, but the media's disaster frames often are not ideal from the perspective of emergency managers. These frames also are affected by individuals and groups outside of the media as well as cultural and societal values.

The paper can help emergency managers identify which disaster frames are best suited for information subsidies (e.g. media releases) and which frames may be better suited for direct‐to‐the public dissemination (e.g. community meetings and public service announcements).

This study seeks to illustrate shared obstacles and opportunities that US nonprofit communicators face, broadening the understanding of nonprofit communication management beyond fundraising, donor relations, and social media practices.

A total of 35 nonprofit communicators from across the USA were interviewed. The participants represented a variety of nonprofit sizes that address a variety of issues.

The interviews revealed six common challenges that the participants face: politics, laws and regulations, media attention, evaluation, brand recognition, and employee engagement. The interviews also revealed four common opportunities that the participants face: job satisfaction, collaboration, communication value, and professional development.

The findings illustrate how nonprofit communicators in the USA address some shared experiences. In doing so, the findings lead to nine valuable areas for future research. Given that the findings are limited to the USA, future research is needed to examine nonprofit communicators’ shared experiences in other countries.

The study builds on recent research examining how the environment in which communication management is practiced affects communication practices, thereby contributing to theory development that predicts effective communication practices via sector. In addition, the study serves as a call to action for researchers to address pressing management issues identified by nonprofit communicators.

The study builds on recent research examining how the environment in which communication management is practiced affects communication practices. In addition, the study serves as a call to action for researchers to address pressing management issues identified by nonprofit communicators.

A well-accepted proposition in the literature of corporate strategic communication and public relations is that consumer-brand relationships (CBRs) affect corporate crisis communication. However, it is inconclusive whether CBRs protect or work against brands, because both buffering effects and love-becomes-hate effects have been found. This study attempts to explain and bridge the seemingly inconsistent findings by clarifying the effects of different types of CBRs in different brand transgressions.

Re-conceptualizing CBRs into non-identifying relationships and identifying relationships, this study examined the possible interaction effects of CBRs and crises on consumers' attitudes and emotions, which then influence their behavioral intentions. A three-step multi-group structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to analyze the data collected from an online experiment with nearly 900 consumers of two brands.

Although non-identifying relationships offer buffering effects, identifying relationships primarily offer love-becomes-hate effects by intensifying negative emotions such as anger and disappointment, which in turn affect consumers' behavioral intentions. Such patterns hold regardless of whether a crisis directly threatens the core meaning of the brand.

This study clarifies the effects of different types of CBRs in crises and shows that deep psychological connections (i.e. identifying relationships) offer love-becomes-hate effects. It suggests that one promising future research direction for crisis communication and public relations scholars is to examine how to mitigate such love-becomes-hate effects so that brands can keep their loyal consumers.

Mental illness has become an important public health issue in society, and media are the most common sources of information about mental illnesses. Thus, it is important to review research on mental illnesses and media. The purpose of this paper is to provide a narrative review of studies on mental illnesses in the media and identifies important research gaps.

A combination of searching key databases and examining reference lists of selected articles was used to identify relevant articles. In total, 41 empirical studies published in the last 12 years were reviewed.

The review found that substantial research had been done to investigate media portrayals of mental illnesses and the effects of such portrayals might have on the public. Media still portray mental illnesses negatively in general, which contributes to the ongoing mental illness stigmatization. Nonetheless, discussions of mental illnesses in direct-to-consumer advertisements and social media tend to be more objective and informative. These objective portrayals could help improve mental health literacy and reduce stigma. More importantly, media can also reduce the stigma if used strategically. Research has found that entertainment-education programs and web-based media have strong potential in reducing mental illness stigma. Recommendations for future research are also discussed.

Findings can guide future efforts to use media to educate the public about mental illnesses and reduce mental illness stigma.

This study reviews the most recent research on mental illnesses in the media and provides important references on the media representation of mental illnesses, media effects of such representation, and using media to reduce stigma.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a postmodern approach to crisis management through the lens of complexity theory to understand six non-profit organizations’ communication responses to anti-abortion terrorism.

Researchers conducted a qualitative content analysis of publicly available documents from six non-profit organizations, which included 62 news releases and statements on organization web sites, 152 tweets, and 63 articles in national and local newspapers.

A history of violence and rituals of remembrance emerged as important pieces of organizational, personal, and social history surrounding anti-abortion terrorism. The process of self-organization facilitated calling publics to action and combating the “terrorism” naming problem. The non-profits’ dynamic environment exemplified the importance of coalition building to construct digital attractor basins, or networks extending beyond permeable boundaries, through a variety of strategies, including new media. Twitter served as a strange attractor, where the concept of interacting agents emerged as a key component of relationship building.

Findings provide opportunities to expand complexity theory.

Findings suggest practical implications for anti-abortion counterterrorism and crisis management, and provide opportunities to develop communication counter measures.

Applying a complexity lens to the study of anti-abortion counterterrorism builds on the growing emphasis of the postmodern approach to crisis management and answers the call for further inquiry into the application of complexity theory to crisis situations. Furthermore, this study fills a gap in the study of crisis management by investigating how multiple organizations handle a crisis.

Using data from 104 countries over a six-year period (2009-2014), this study proposes a value-added predictor in service industries based on the eight indicators of the prosperity index, namely economy, entrepreneurship and opportunity, governance, education, health, safety and security, personal freedom and social capital.

The fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and complexity theory, a relatively novel approach for developing and testing the conceptual model, are used for asymmetric modelling of value added in service industries, and the predictive validity of proposed configural model is tested.

Apart from advancing method and theory, this study simulates causal conditions (i.e. recipes) leading to both high and low scores of the value added of services. The configural conditions indicating a high/low level of value added in service industries can be used as a guiding strategy for marketers, investors and policy makers.

An analysis of worldwide data provides complex models demonstrating both how to regulate country conditions to achieve a high value-added score and select a foreign country for investment that offers a high level of value-added service.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the moderating roles of two distinct styles of coping and decision latitude on the relationship between three facets of role stress and psychological strain in six national contexts.

The objective of the research is to examine the relative predictive efficacies of three theory specific moderators in six countries which differ on the cultural dimension of individualism‐collectivism. The data are analyzed using moderated regression analysis.

The results show that problem‐focused coping is a better moderator in the individualistic countries and that emotion‐focused coping is a better moderator in the collectivistic contexts. None of the three moderators moderate the relationships in Germany and South Africa – the two countries which had scores in the mid‐range of the individualism‐collectivism continuum. Findings are discussed for their significance into the interplay of cultural variations and coping with work stress in predicting psychological strain or distress on the job.

Practical implications for managing human resources in various subsidiaries of multinational and global organizations are discussed.

This paper confirms existing theories and expands the authors’ understanding of role stress and psychological strain in different cultural contexts.