Organizational research has long been interested in crises and crisis management. Whether focused on crisis antecedents, outcomes, or managing a crisis, research has revealed a number of important findings. However, research in this space remains fragmented, making it difficult for scholars to understand the literature’s core conclusions, recognize unsolved problems, and navigate paths forward. To address these issues, we propose an integrative framework of crises and crisis management that draws from research in strategy, organizational theory, and organizational behavior as well as from research in public relations and corporate communication. We identify two primary perspectives in the literature, one focused on the internal dynamics of a crisis and one focused on managing external stakeholders. We review core concepts from each perspective and highlight the commonalities that exist between them. Finally, we use our integrative framework to propose future research directions for scholars interested in crises and crisis management.
We use content analysis to examine the content analysis literature in organization studies. Given the benefits of content analysis, it is no surprise that its use in organization studies has been growing in the course of the past 25 years (Erdener & Dunn, 1990;Jauch, Osborn, & Martin 1980). First, we review the principles and the advantages associated with the method. Then, we assess how the methodology has been applied in the literature in terms of research themes, data sources, and methodological refinements. Although content analysis has been applied to research topics across the subdomains of management research, research in strategy and managerial cognition have yielded particularly interesting results. We conclude with suggestions for enhancing the utility of content analytic methods in organization studies.
We contribute to research on the management of social perceptions by considering the relative effectiveness of a firm's technical and ceremonial actions in managing media coverage after its own or its competitors' wrongdoing. We examine these relationships in the context of product recalls by U.S. toy companies over the ten-year period 1998-2007. As hypothesized, firms with higher levels of wrongdoing experience less positive media coverage; however, this decline is mitigated during periods of higher industry wrongdoing. Additionally, we find support for a negative spillover effect: the tenor of media coverage about a focal firm is less positive if others in its industry recall products. Further, technical actions help firms attenuate the negative effect of their own wrongdoing on the tenor of media coverage, whereas ceremonial actions amplify this effect. In contrast, ceremonial actions are more effective in attenuating the negative effect of industry wrongdoing on the tenor of media coverage about a focal firm. Information intermediaries-third parties such as the media, financial analysts, regulators, and consumer organizations-disseminate information, frame issues, and assist stakeholders in making sense of firm actions. By influencing stakeholders' perceptions about a firm, these infomediaries
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