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This paper seeks to advance paracrisis research by clarifying paracrises’ distinct features and developing typologies of paracrises and response strategies with strong external validity.

A case series study of 143 paracrises systematically selected from various news and trade sources was conducted to build an organizational paracrisis communication framework that connects paracrisis clusters with paracrisis response strategies.

Results of the study attest to the validity of the paracrisis concept by demonstrating refined paracrisis clusters’ connections with refined paracrisis response strategies.

This study enriches paracrisis research by refining the paracrisis definition, paracrisis clusters and response strategies. Its rigorous descriptions of how organizations address paracrises distinguish paracrisis response strategies from traditional crisis response strategies and generate rich possibilities for future analytic investigations.

As perhaps the first empirical attempt to build a comprehensive framework of organizational paracrisis communication, this descriptive study lays the groundwork for the burgeoning paracrisis communication research.

The concept of social media crisis has been consequently replaced by the term “paracrisis”. However, the economic implications of the paracrises have not been thoroughly researched by now. The purpose of this paper is to examine the potential influence of paracrisis on companies’ stock price values.

Secondary data analysis has been conducted to identify paracrises for the publicly listed companies and verify that there were no other market events that could affect the stock price during the observed period. Quantitative data analysis has been conducted using the event study, observing stock price values before and during the paracrisis, and the relationship between stock price oscillations and S&P 500 trends was tested.

There were no significant differences in stock price values before and during the paracrisis. Additionally, a strong correlation between S&P 500 and stock price trends has been found. Findings indicate that paracrises do not significantly impact the stock price behaviour and they should be considered as an irrelevant market event from the stock price point of view.

This study is the first research that examines the stock price paracrisis interdependence.

Corporate philanthropy in the U.S. has emerged since the mid-19th century. This essay takes a historical and interpretive perspective on its practice. The author categorizes corporate philanthropy into four ethical models to examine each modelʼs communicative priorities and ethical concerns. These communicative priorities and ethical concerns become more complex as corporate philanthropic entities utilize social media. To this end, the potential for what Coombs and Holladay (2012) called a “paracrisis” emerges. This essay examines the potential for community partners to be affected by a corporationʼs presence on social media (and vice versa) through the interpretive lens of the paracrisis. The paper concludes with recommendations for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a crisis risk. The bulk of the current research on CSR and crisis examined the role of CSR as an asset in a crisis. CSR as crisis risk is a direct function of CSR’s increasingly important role in reputation management. CSR has become an important aspect of corporate reputations – it is one of the dimensions used to assess a corporation’s crisis. The value of CSR to reputations is illustrated in the RepTrak reputation measure from the Reputation Institute and the value it places upon CSR. If stakeholders can challenge CSR claims by arguing a corporation is acting irresponsibly, the stakeholders can erode the corporation’s reputational assets by creating a challenge crisis. A CSR-based challenge occurs when stakeholders redefine a corporation’s current practices as irresponsible. The CSR-based challenge can be risk because it can damage reputational assets and potentially escalate into a crisis. CSR becomes a leverage point for stakeholders seeking to engage in a challenge crisis. As corporations place more value on the CSR dimension of reputation, CSR-based challenge becomes an increasingly powerful leverage point.

The paper is conceptual with an emphasis on theory building.

The manuscript details the CSR-based challenge process. It examines the nature of CSR-based challenges, how they can become threats to corporations, and how corporations can respond to the threats. There is also an explanation of how CSR-based challenges indicate the shift to private politics/social issues management and the implications of this shift for advancing a neoliberal perspective.

CSR and crises have a much more complex relationship than current research has identified. CSR can be a crisis risk, not just an asset used to protect a reputation during a crisis. CSR can be the reason a crisis exists and threats a corporation – it is a crisis risk. The primary manifestation of CSR as a crisis risk is the challenge crisis premised on social irresponsibility, what the authors term the CSR-based challenge crisis. This paper will detail the process whereby CSR is transformed from a crisis resource to a crisis threat. The end result of this analysis will be set of insights into CSR-based challenge crises. These insights can help stakeholders seeking to create social change through a challenge and corporate managers seeking to address a challenge crisis.

Challenge crises are an example of private politics/social issues management, when stakeholders seek to create changes in corporate behavior by engaging the organization directly rather than through public policy efforts. The paper offers insights into how social issues management can work to create social change by altering problematic corporate behaviors.

There is limited research into CSR as a crisis risk and in understanding how challenge crises help to create social change. This paper will provide new insights into CSR as a crisis risk, challenge crises, and private politics. Ideas from public relations, corporate communication, and political communication will be fused to create a novel framework for illuminating these related topics.

The aim of this paper is to examine how crises can be triggered online, how different social media tools escalate crises, and how issues gain credibility when they transit to mainstream media.

This exploratory study uses the multiple case study method to analyze five crises, generated online, throughout their life-cycles, in order to build analytic generalizations (Yin).

Crises are often triggered online when stakeholders are empowered by social media platforms to air their grievances. YouTube and Twitter have been used to raise issues through its large user base and the lack of gatekeeping. Facebook and blogs escalate crises beyond the immediate stakeholder groups. These crises are covered by mainstream media because of their newsworthiness. As a result, the crises gain credibility offline. Mainstream media coverage ceases when traditional news elements are no longer present.

If crises are increasingly generated online, this study aims to apply a framework to manage the impact on organizations.

How practitioners can use different new media tools to counter crises online and manage the transition of crises to mainstream media.

This is one of the first few studies that analyses how organizational crises originate online, gain traction and get escalated onto mainstream media. Understanding what causes crises to trigger online and gain legitimacy offline will enable practitioners to engage in effective crisis management strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a rationale and framework for examining stakeholder reactions to crisis communication messages in various social media channels. Stakeholders can become crisis communications by entering various sub-arenas of the larger rhetorical arena. The concept of sub-arena is presented and a case analysis used to illustrate the application and value of examining stakeholder crisis communicators during a crisis.

Content analysis was used to evaluate publicly available social media messages posted on the Livestrong blog and the Huffington Post online news site.

The paper demonstrates that monitoring reactions of stakeholders can reveal how individuals can act as crisis communications in social media messages can serve as barometers the effectiveness of an organization's crisis response. The importance of examining multiple sub-arenas is considered due to the influence of supportive stakeholders in organizational social media.

Only two sub-arenas were analyzed using one crisis response during a crisis that extended over a number of months.

The paper includes implications for the examination of social media messages from supportive stakeholder and neutral sub-arenas. The results provide indicators of the effectiveness of an organization's crisis response and how stakeholder messages in social media may contribute to or undermine the crisis response.

This paper demonstrates the value of monitoring social media comments to gauge reactions to organizational crisis responses and demonstrates how stakeholders can function as informal crisis managers. It also begins the discussion of the value and conceptualization of sub-arenas.

Once a corporate crisis is entangled with a social issue, how consumers make sense of the crisis can be impacted by issue-based opinion polarization. This study investigates the underlying mechanisms as consumers go through this process. This study also examines whether corporate social advocacy (CSA) can be an effective crisis-response strategy for mitigating reputational loss.

Theoretical inquiries were empirically tested using an online experiment (N = 792). The experiment set the context in China, in a working-overtime-issue-related crisis. It had a 2 (online exposure: anti-issue opinion vs. pro-issue opinion) × 2 (CSA: absence vs. presence) between-subject design with a continuous variable (pre-existing issue attitudes) measured before the manipulation.

This study found that pre-existing issue attitudes can be directly and indirectly associated with corporate reputation, for the issue attitudes influence how consumers attribute crisis blame. Such a direct effect of pre-existing issue attitudes varies depending on which polarized opinion consumers were exposed to on social media. This study also found CSA to be a robust crisis response strategy, through multiple mechanisms, in protecting the corporate reputation.

Scholars are scarcely aware of the threats that issue-based opinion polarization poses to corporate reputation. This study serves as an early attempt to provide theoretical explanations. In addition to this, this study extends the current conceptual understandings of CSA during corporate crises that involve social issues while adding fresh insights into the established typology of crisis-response strategies.

Guided by the growing importance of social-mediated organisational communication, this study examines how communication professionals within healthcare organisations perceive and respond to the reputation impacts of social media on the organisation’s reputation. Although the healthcare sector finds itself in the midst of a (continually) transforming landscape characterised by large amounts of digital health (mis)information and an empowered “patient-as-consumer”, little is known about how professionals in this sector understand the changes and respond to them. Moreover, much extant scholarship on the topic is published in specialised health or medical journals and does not explicitly address the communication implications for healthcare organisations.

In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with communication professionals responsible for social media across eight hospitals in the Netherlands. The sample included two participants working as communication consultants/social media advisors for healthcare organisations. In all, 15 interviews were conducted.

Building on interviewee perspectives, the authors advance the CARE (Control, Access(ability), Responsive(ness) and Engagement) model of social-mediated communication, highlighting the dualistic characteristics of each dimension. This model is built upon a careful analysis of healthcare professional responses. In an always-on environment, understanding and managing the tensions within the authors’ model may be decisive to the reputation implications of social media use.

Understanding the tensions within each dimension lends a more nuanced perspective on the potential impact(s) of social media as experienced by professionals in the field. In shifting away from a binary, either/or approach, the paper contributes to explicating the complexities of a pervasive phenomenon (i.e. social-mediated communication) and its multifaceted impacts on the healthcare sector.

Little research has focused on the impact of organizational crisis on their internal stakeholders – the employees. This paper aims to fill this void by examining the impression management strategies used by senior managers in managing their employees during organizational crisis and the impact of these strategies on employees.

The authors collected qualitative data from three organizations and used multiple analytical lenses (such as thematic, content and trope) to explore patterns in senior managers’ management of employees during crisis.

Emerging patterns in the data revealed that the emotional state and reactions of employees (individual and collective) during crisis include anger, fear, shame, depression and shock. Additionally, data revealed two major contradictions (tensions) in managing employees during crisis: maintaining and compromising standard and managers’ wants versus employees’ desire in the way organization crisis is managed. Based on these preliminary findings and using affective event theory and the theory of collective emotions as a frame, the authors built a conceptual model that depicts the relationship between organizational crisis, impression management and emotion-driven employee attitudes and behaviors.

A major limitation in the current research is that authors’ data are largely composed of text (e.g. from newspaper and websites). Nevertheless, the textual data were based on actual interviews with stakeholders and victims and have more than compensated for the limitation. Theoretically, by examining the emotional states and reactions of internal (rather than external) stakeholders to organizational crisis, the authors extend the literature in the area of organizational crisis and crisis management, while the testable propositions in this conceptual model have a potential to open up new pathways for studying organizational crisis. Practically, it is imperative for managers to have skills to identify and manage key employees’ emotional states and reactions to crisis. Managers should align their words and actions during crisis management to increase employees trust. Also pre-crisis planning should include specific guidelines on how to identify and manage employees’ individual and collective emotions during crisis.

The results show that inappropriate impression management strategies may worsen employees’ emotional states and reactions (individual and collective) during crisis; therefore, it is imperative for managers to have skills in identifying key employees’ emotional states and reactions to crisis and the impression management strategies appropriate in managing them. A training that sharpens managers’ emotional intelligence will be helpful in managing the emotions of employees (individual and collective) during crisis. Also, pre-crisis planning should include specific guidelines on how to identify and manage employees’ individual and collective emotions during crisis, while senior managers’ words and actions during crisis need to be synchronized to engender employees’ trust.

This study demonstrates that beyond emotions of employees during crisis, there are contradictions and tensions in the senior manager’s management of their employees during crisis. Also, outcomes of a quantitative test of the conceptual model developed from the current study should improve the generalizability of the results and open up new pathways for future research in this area.