Previous research in crisis communication has shown that a corporation's history of crises has a damaging effect on reputation during a current crisis. This study uses an experiment with student subjects testing not only the effect of a corporation's own crises on reputation, but also the reputational effect of a corporation without a crisis history but in an industry with a history of similar crises, called extraorganizational crisis history. Findings of this experiment show that publics' knowledge of extraorganizational crisis history may protect an organization's reputation in a crisis. Theoretical and practical implications of this finding are discussed and further research is suggested. CHAPTER 2 REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE Early Scholarship Much of the early scholarship examining crisis communications came from the perspective of the speech communications academic discipline. In what now can be seen as a seminal work in crisis communications, Ware and Linkugel (1973) wrote an article in the Quarterly Journal of Speech that began to bridge the gap between speech and communication studies and nascent public relations scholarship. Looking mostly at modern American speeches by Clarence Darrow, Eugene V. Debs, Edward Kennedy, and others, the authors examined apologia as a communicative tool to lessen reputational damage. An apologia was defined as "the speech of self-defense" (p. 273), usually through a justification of one's actions; apologiae may or may not contain an apology (Hearit 1994). Ware and

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