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This paper considers the role of culture in crisis management narratives. The importance of sensemaking and sense-giving to crisis management is expanded by exploring how understanding organization culture may affect the plausibility of sense-giving narratives in crises.

The crisis management, sensemaking, sense-giving and organizational culture literature studies are briefly reviewed. The paper then explores how plausibility may be dependent on organizational culture and how different cultures may create different dependencies. Propositions are developed and the potential organizational interventions based on these propositions in the action research tradition are offered, as they are potential practical and research implications.

Organizational cultures as shared sensemaking mechanisms provide leaders with the framework for constructing crisis management messages. A plausible message must resonate within the shared cultural experiences of members to shape and direct behaviors during a crisis while maintaining necessary flexibility to evolve as the crisis progresses.

Potential avenues of future research include empirically testing the effects of cultural alignment on crisis management messaging employing action research or other methods, how strength of culture affects the process and the malleability of plausibility.

Practical implications include an organization's understanding of how culture affects not only the messages sent but also how employees might receive the sense-giving narratives. The paper also highlights the importance of flexibility in sense-giving narratives to allow evolution of the message as the crisis changes. Additional practical implications are provided.

This manuscript considers the role of culture in crisis management sense-giving narratives, a topic that has received little research attention. The manuscript argues that aligning the narrative within the organization's shared cultural understanding will increase employee acceptance and adherence to the message. The paper further discusses the importance of flexibility in the sense-giving narratives as the crisis changes.

This paper aims to argue that, while destination benchmarking and visitor surveys seek to measure the visitor experience, they privilege the destination manager or researcher rather than taking the visitor's viewpoint. It seeks to suggest that capturing and analysing visitor stories while in the destination can facilitate understanding of how destination image changes with actual experience, and what factors or attributes are important, thereby offering a deeper insight into the process through which destination experience is transformed (sense making) and transmitted (sense giving) via those stories, that all important word of mouth publicity.

Unstructured interviews were recorded with visitors in Edinburgh and Greenwich. An interpretive approach was employed in analysing the interview data to uncover facets of visitor experience affecting the image conveyed through the narrative.

The research reveals three elements involved in the sense making and sense giving process and sets out the three categories of visitor consumption characteristics which are implicated in the process.

Although the outcomes of the sense making and sense giving process are mediated by the incidents, interactions and characteristics of the individual visitor, the process itself is common to all visitors. Analysing visitor narratives to uncover the mediating factors illuminates the visitor's actual destination experience and its impact on their understanding or image of a destination. Narratives proved to be a useful research tool.

The interview and analysis techniques used could be readily adapted for use alongside existing standardised visitor survey tools to provide destination managers and marketers a greater understanding of the impact of customer care and visitor management programmes and how narrative may be useful in tailoring destination marketing to meet the requirements of specific visitor groups.

The paper demonstrates the utility of capturing and analysing visitor narratives at the point of destination consumption for understanding actual destination experience and the way in which it is transmitted as word of mouth information to others.

The purpose of this paper is to capture legitimising principles of recent successions to the throne through narrative time. Further, this study considers leaders’ sense-giving to succession.

This research applies a “temporal narrative analysis” to explicate legitimising principles of narrative time in three recent case studies of royal succession: the kingdoms of Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands.

The findings show that royal successions in three modern European constitutional monarchies are legitimised through giving sense to narrative time. The legitimacy of timing succession is embedded in multiple temporal narratives, in which heirs apparent are brought forward as the new generation who will modernise the monarchy.

The paper presents an innovative conceptual framework of sense-giving to succession through narrative time. This framework will be helpful to scholars who aim to grasp legitimising principles of temporal narration in leadership succession.

The purpose of this research is to explore how an industry is represented in multimodal public media narratives and to explore how this representation subsequently affects the formation of public sense-giving space during a persisting crisis, such as a pandemic. The question asked is: how do the use of multimodality by public service media dynamically shape representations of industry identity during a persisting crisis?

This study made use of a multimodal approach. The verbal and visual media text on the restaurant industry during the COVID-19 pandemic that were published in Finland by the public service media distributor Yle were studied. Data published between March 2020 and March 2022 were analysed. The data consisted of 236 verbal texts, including 263 visuals.

Three narratives were identified– victim, servant and survivor – that construct power relations and depict the identity of the restaurant industry differently. It was argued that multimodal media narratives hold three meaning making functions: sentimentalizing, juxtaposing and nuancing industry characteristics. It was also argued that multimodal public service media narratives have wider implications in possibly shaping the future attractiveness of the industry and organizational members' understanding of their identity.

This research contributes to sensemaking literature in that it explores the role of power – explicitly or implicitly constructed through media narratives during crisis. Furthermore, this research contributes to sensemaking literature in that it shows how narratives take shape multimodally during a continuous crisis, and how this impacts the construction of industry identity.

The purpose of this paper is to present an exploratory analysis of how key actors in three New Zealand regional tourism organizations interpret various local and general contextual conditions in accounting for website development, and how such sense‐making is likely to have shaped the configuration of generic web technology in each organization.

Narrative analysis of accounts provided by key actors involved in website development planning and decision‐making in three small tourism organizations is used. Where possible, the narrative analysis was supplemented by document review and interviews with other organizational stakeholders.

Despite their ostensibly similar roles, the three organizations developed websites that exhibited significant variation in scope, functionality and sophistication. The analysis suggests that much of this local variation in website form and function was the result of how the general managers (GMs) in these organizations, acting as “configurational intrapreneurs” in website development, interpreted contextual “conditions of possibility” in which their organizations were situated.

As analysis occurred after website development, recourse is made to development narratives authored in an interview setting by the GMs of the three organizations studied. It is argued that the sense‐making occurring in these situated narratives reflects the sense‐giving performed by these key actors during the website development process.

The study suggests that how specific conditions of possibility are perceived and mobilized by influential actors plays an important role in shaping the technological outcome of website development, particularly in small organizations. It demonstrates the utility of analysing the sense‐making processes inherent in narratives of information systems development as a way of understanding the strategic development and use of such systems.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of responsible leadership.

The author draws on a range of current literature and experiences to share views on the need for responsible leadership.

The need for a new narrative is outlined and the challenges described.

The paper inspires leaders to embrace a new narrative, a narrative that requires a different focus from leadership and a new understanding of what responsible leadership entails.

The paper explores university leaders' employee-focused sensegiving discourse during the COVID-19 health crisis. The aim is to reveal how leadership sensegiving narratives construct emotion in the rhetor-audience relationship.

A social constructionist, sensemaking approach centres on the meaning-making discourse of university leaders. Using rhetorical discourse analysis (RDA), the study analysed 67 emails sent to staff during a three-month period at the start of the global pandemic. RDA helps to reveal how university leaders help employees make sense of changing realities.

Three core narratives: organisational competence and resilience; empathy, reassurance and recognition; and community and location reveal a multi-layered understanding of leadership sensegiving discourse in which emotion intersects with material and temporal sensemaking dimensions. In supporting a process of organisational identification and belonging, these core narratives help to mitigate audience dissonance driven by the antenarrative of uncertainty.

An interpretivist approach was used to analyse qualitative data from two UK universities. While focused on internal communication, the employee perspective was not examined. Nevertheless, this paper extends the human dimension of internal crisis communication, building on constructionist approaches that are concerned with emotion and sensegiving.

This paper expands the domain of internal crisis communication. It integrates the social construction of emotion and sensemaking with the underexplored material and temporal dimensions in internal crisis communication and applies RDA.

The COVID-19 pandemic has hit all nations across the globe since the beginning of 2020. As the whole world is connected ever than before, the virus has spread very fast and affected almost all nations worldwide. Despite facing a common enemy, each nation reacts and manages the virus differently. The research studies how culture influences the way nations and society choose different approaches towards the pandemic.

The study uses classical cultural dimension by Hofstede and links them with three conflict management styles “integrating”, “avoiding” and “competing” in analysing three main measurements of the pandemic (test rate, case rate and death rate). The study analyses data from 116 countries and clusters them using a combination of agglomerative hierarchical clustering (AHC) and K-means clustering.

The study shows there are six nation clusters with different ways of handling COVID-19, driven by their underlying dominant culture dimension. It shows that individualistic culture combined with high indulgence dimension makes fatality worse, while nations with collectivism culture or uncertainty avoidance culture are better off, especially if accompanied with restraint dimension or long-term orientation.

The originality of the research lies in linking Hofstede cultural dimension with modified Onishi's conflict management style in analysing how different cultures and nations manage the COVID-19 pandemic.

Service research has previously documented service providers’ role in addressing the barriers of technology mediation, mostly at the service delivery level. The purpose of this study is to enhance our understanding about the role of service providers who hold strategic and operational roles, as well as investigate the impact of coordinated, organization-wide initiatives in dealing with the demands and associated emotional ambivalence of technology-mediated services.

This qualitative study draws from a series of in-depth interviews with health-care service providers who hold strategic and operational roles in health-care organizations along with participant observation to develop an understanding of the broader organizational context of telehealth services.

This paper outlines the strategic sense-giving process and highlights how health-care service providers who hold strategic and operational roles enact the sense-giver role. This study illustrates that strategic sense-giving involves the recognition of sense-making gaps; identification of sense-giving opportunities; and provision of templates of action.

This study illustrates that sense-giving can be performed by a number of organizational members in a more formalized way which extends informal sense-giving efforts at the peer-to-peer level. The importance of strategic sense-giving in providing templates of action for service providers and consumers is highlighted. This study also shows how strategic sense-giving safeguards against confusion and errors by communicating appropriate ways of using technology. Finally, the role of strategic sense-giving in helping service providers and consumers cope with the emotional ambivalence of technology-mediated service interactions are demonstarted.

Using composite style measures of the letter to shareholders, the purpose of this paper is to elaborate dominant rhetorical profiles and qualify them from an impression management (IM) perspective. In addition, the paper examines how institutional differences affect rhetorical profiles by comparing intensity and contingencies of rhetorical profiles of UK and US companies.

The authors use automated text analysis to capture linguistic style characteristics of a panel of UK and US companies and employ factor analysis to determine rhetorical profiles. Next, the authors investigate company-level and country-level determinants of a company’s rhetorical stance.

The authors document three prominent rhetorical profiles: an emphatic acclaiming stance, a cautious plausibility-based framing position, and a logic-based rationalizing orientation. The profiles represent distinct self-presentational logics and have different readability effects. Rhetorical IM is stronger in US companies, but higher expected scrutiny in the US institutional environment affects sensitivity of rhetorical postures to message credibility and litigation risk, while marginally increasing the less litigation-sensitive defensive framing style in US letters.

The authors develop replicable archival-based measures of prominent rhetorical IM traits of the shareholder letter, based on composite style features. The authors argue that they are qualitatively different from content-based IM proxies. The authors investigate their institutional and organizational relevance by examining how company features and country-level differences affect incentives and constraints for style-based rhetorical IM.