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The purpose of this paper, a set of two studies, is to elaborate on the concept of scansis and its effects upon crisis communication theory and practice. A scansis represents the intersection of a scandal and crisis, essentially when a crisis becomes a scandal. A new term was created due to the varied ways in which the term scandal is used and misused. The effects of scansis on crisis communication are examined through two studies. A scansis is unique because it creates moral outrage and is a function of a perception of injustice coupled with greed.

Experimental design is used in both studies to test for the effects of specific crisis response strategies used during a scansis. The crisis response strategies were manipulated to determine whether or not corrective action with moral recognition is more effective at helping organizations during a crisis than those crisis response strategies that do not contain a moral component.

The two studies found no short-term effect for crisis responses during scansis. This included no difference between corrective action with moral recognition and the other three response conditions for the short-term factors of organizational reputation, negative word-of-mouth intentions, purchase intentions and anger. However, Study 2 found that corrective action with moral recognition was perceived as the most empathetic response and created the lowest levels of moral outrage. The authors postulate that corrective action with moral recognition has a long-term effect after a scansis by creating a positive response that moves organizations away from being stigmatized.

The results raise questions about the current configuration of the intentional crisis cluster articulated in situational crisis communication theory (SCCT). When just consider assessments crisis responsibility, a scansis would be part of the preventable crisis cluster. However, the evaluation of justice and greed suggest a scansis may be a unique crisis type that does not fit within the intentional crisis cluster and the prescribed short-term effects of crisis response strategies recommend by SCCT. The scansis establishes a boundary condition for the limits of crisis response strategies on short-term effects such as reputation and purchase intention. These findings require us to rethink elements of current crisis communication theory.

The lack of short-term benefits should not be an argument for abandoning accommodative crisis response strategies. Practitioners need to realize the limits of crisis response strategies for creating short-term benefits and think about the potential long-term benefits offered by crisis response strategies.

Scansis is a new concept for crisis communication and provides a link between the crisis communication and organizational stigma literatures. The two studies are the first attempts to empirically examine scansis and opens new avenues of thinking and research for crisis communication and organizational stigma researchers.

Drawing on expectancy violation theory, this study aims to assess the impact of corporate environmental irresponsibility (CEI) on workplace deviant behaviors (WDB) of Generation Z and Millennials through the mediation of moral outrage.

The data were collected from 328 nonmanagerial employees working in the refinery, petroleum and power distribution companies who have been convicted for committing environmental irresponsibility by a court of law. Multigroup analysis (MGA) was used to estimate the hypothesized relationships.

Results revealed that CEI affects WDBs positively. Moreover, the MGA results demonstrated that the deviant behavior of Generation Z in response to environmental irresponsibility is higher than of the Millennials.

Theoretically, the findings implicate that harming the environment will cost organizational performance through deviant behaviors.

This study provides a new lens for the executive management that eliminating social irresponsibility is more important than incurring sustainability initiatives, especially from the new generation’s perspective.

The originality of this study is that it confirmed the impact of CEI on employees’ deviant behaviors; and extended the scope of expectancy violation theory to the field of human resources.

The purpose of this article is expository in the main; critical to a lesser degree. It will attempt to show how Karl Marx, enraged by the imperfections and inhumanity of the capitalist society, “fought” for its supersession by the communist society on which he dwelt so fondly, that society which would emerge from the womb of a dying capitalism. It asks such questions as these: Is it possible to create the truly human society envisaged by Marx? Is perfection of man and society a mere will‐o'‐the‐wisp? A brief analysis, therefore, of the imperfections of capitalism is undertaken for the purpose of revealing the evils which Marx sought to eliminate by revolution of the most violent sort. In this sense, the nature of man under capitalism is analysed. Marx found the breed wanting, in a word, dehumanised. An attempt is, therefore, made to discuss the new man of Marxism, man's own creation, and the traits of that new man, one freed at last from the alienating effects of private property, division of labour, money, and religion. Another question that springs to mind is this: how does Marx propose to transcend alienation?

The purpose of this paper is to understand how hospitality companies can best explain controversial corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities to consumers who may not agree with the CSR activity. This research explores message framing through emotional and cognitive appeals to influence consumer perceptions of the Gideon Bible in USA hotel rooms. The study uses the theory of deontic justice to measure the impacts of messaging on consumer perceptions of the morality of the Gideon Bible as suicide prevention in hotels and its relation to controversial CSR initiatives.

The study uses an experimental study design via a self-administered survey to analyze participants’ perceptions of the placement of the Gideon Bible in hotel rooms and participants’ attitudes toward CSR initiatives based on deontic justice and religion using different message framing conditions.

Results show that religion was a major determinant of attitude towards the Gideon Bible, but the sentiment analysis also revealed that negative perceptions can be mitigated through message framing via emotional and cognitive appeals. Additionally, the cognitive appeal did impact CSR perceptions, as did identifying as Christian. Moral outrage emerged as a significant moderator for the relationships between message framing, attitudes toward the Gideon Bible and CSR.

This study provides an extension of deontic justice research to examine justice traits in accepting controversial CSR.

Despite its perceived benefits, organic food has very limited uptake in the consumer market. Many studies have investigated the causes of this slow adoption, but limited attention has been paid to the ethical motives of consumer preference for organic food. Also, no research has addressed this issue through an unobtrusive data collection method. Therefore, this netnography-based qualitative study explores the deontological and teleological ethical motives for organic food consumption through the lens of Hunt and Vitell's general theory of marketing ethics.

User-generated content in the form of posts and comments from a food-related Facebook page, Food Matters (https://www.facebook.com/foodmatters), with over 2.3m followers, was thematically analysed using Hunt and Vitell's general theory of marketing ethics. Over 1.5m posts and comments were mined through Facepager 4.0.4 after due approvals. Organic-food-related content was manually screened. Netnography, an Internet-based ethnography technique which is a relatively underutilised and unobtrusive method of data collection, was employed on selected content to understand the consumer behaviour towards organic food in an online environment.

This study analysed a total of 158,583 posts and comments generated between March 2008 and December 2019. Out of these, 2,243 posts and comments were focussed on organic food. A total of seven themes emerged out of which six were found to be inextricably linked to ethical values of organic food consumption; three deontological (moral obligations, moral accountability and moral outrage) and two teleological (perceived risk and perceived benefits) themes. However, the seventh theme, consumers' lack of trust in organic food retailers, emerged as a major barrier in the proliferation of organic food.

This study is the first application of Hunt and Vitell's general theory of marketing ethics in organic food. The novel findings are that trust is a bigger issue than the price differential of organic food. Implications for marketers, policymakers, retailers and certification bodies are discussed to extend the current knowledge of motives and barriers to organic food.

This study aims at exploring the mobilization of the Umbrella Movement and examining how the interplay of emotion and meaning contribute to a mass occupation via the mass media and social media. It proposes a model of emotional mobilization and explains how and why the perception of eviction is capable of triggering the subsequent collective political action through moral shock on bystanders.

The paper is an exploratory study and adopts the method of semi-structured interview. It interviewed 31 participants of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. The data were complemented by discourse analysis of video clips and participation observation of conflict scenes between protestors and police.

This study provides insights on how a potential participant can be motivated to participate in a social movement, after perceiving violent behaviors of police on other people. It suggests that moral outrage can be generated when people realizes a dramatic difference between expected behaviors and perceived behaviors of police officers through watching live broadcast or video clips. It also suggests that the shared social identity between protestors, police and perceivers provides the ground for the perceivers to feel angry and believe they are obliged to response to the situation.

Because of the method and approach, the study may lack generalizability. However, researchers can test the proposed propositions by applying the model to other unexpected mobilization of social movement in history, or expand the model by studying the mobilizing power of direct and indirect perception of eviction, and the examine responses of the same physical conflict from people with different social identities.

This study explains how the mobilization of a social movement is possible despite the failure of mobilization by activists. It also complements the idea of moral shock by grounding such process on interaction order.

While there has been a great deal of research to distinguish the factors that promote the adoption of sustainable consumption, however there has been a very little attention given to the contribution of justice, coping appraisal, and psychological distance. The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential role of deontic justice, protection motivation, and construal level theories to elucidate the green purchase intention.

Data were collected from 471 participants in a laboratory experiment. Then, structural equation modeling was carried out to analyze the data.

Protection motivation theory is valuable to apply specifically since it introduces the concept of coping appraisal. The findings demonstrate that deontic justice theory (DJT) is a suitable framework that can be employed to shed more light on sustainable consumption. The study shows that consumer can conceptualize a green product at different levels of concreteness or abstraction.

This study is a pioneering effort to look at sustainable consumption within the context of DJT. It departs from the more traditional research by repositioning moral obligation as the primary driver of green purchase intention and by elucidating when green purchase intention is elevated in investigating the moderating role of mindset.

This study aims to examine personal factors that drive the initiation of an online firestorm, an online collaborative attack against a brand that usually occurs when a brand fails or engages in misconduct.

A structured questionnaire is used for data collection. Via an online panel, 303 questionnaires are completed. Hypotheses are tested using structural equation modelling.

Civic engagement and, to a lesser extent, narcissism explain intentions to initiate online firestorms. Individuals’ inherent concern for others and for ethical issues prompts them to punish a brand publicly, with the expectation that other individuals will follow and that the brand will feel compelled to react. Misconduct-related appraisal factors, such as severity, proximity, moral inequity and outrage, can amplify the effect of civic engagement.

Future research should investigate whether the findings hold for different types of misconduct, cultures and other forms of narcissism.

By providing managers with a better understanding of the motivations for launching an attack, this study offers guidance on managing a brand when an online firestorm occurs.

Whereas previous research has focused on external drivers of online firestorms, this study builds on the prosocial behaviour literature to analyse the individual characteristics prompting the initiation of an online firestorm.

The paper aims to propose a new conceptualisation of consumer anger directed against a company.

In this paper, an integrative review of the literature on anger in marketing has been conducted.

Anger at the firm is experienced in two forms: vengeful anger or problem-focused anger. The motivational goals associated with each differentiate between the two types and lead to different relational consequences: vengeful anger implies a desire to hurt the culprit, whereas problem-focused anger solely requires the attainment of a thwarted goal. The two types are associated with different patterns of appraisals, levels of intensity and emotion expression. These differences, documented in the literature, are not universal but shaped by contextual and personal variables. Although marketers conflate these two types of anger under the same label, only vengeful anger represents a threat to marketing relationships, whereas problem-focused anger has positive consequences if managed appropriately.

Studies that examine anger will benefit from a more nuanced understanding of this concept. This paper raises important implications for the measurement of this emotion, as existing scales are not able to measure the goals associated with the two types of anger.

The insights presented help managers form strategies to address consumer anger in contexts such as service failures and/or crisis communications.

The paper extends scholars’ understanding of consumer anger. It offers an improved conceptualisation of this emotion, opening new avenues for future research.

This chapter aims at presenting a general picture of the emotions of protest, which can also capture the “feel” of the field and uncover the fluidity and complexity of these dynamics. Using data collected through participant observations at the vigils of Women in Black (WIB) in Israel, interviews, documents, and WIB website, the chapter presents maps of emotions that go beyond listing emotion words. The analysis follows differentiation between two overarching categories: processes that occur, respectively, outside and inside the vigil's time-space. Within the vigil's time-space setting, three different arenas of action were identified. These arenas were both physical (paralleling the physical layout of the vigil site) and symbolic in which different emotional dynamics evolved. The analysis demonstrates the contribution of emotion maps to our understanding of the emotional dynamics of protest. The study demonstrated the ways in which maps have uncovered the complex scene in which different emotional processes evolve; the fluid nature of emotional responses of both vigilers and spectators as they spill over from one arena to another; and the patterning of emotions into different constellations that point at different processes. The theoretical contributions are discussed.