No abstract

Crisis communication is a multidisciplinary area of study that has generated a variety of best practices and processes by which organizations communicate before, during, and after crises. Crisis communication scholarship has generated definitions of crisis and risk, crisis stages, and useful typologies and taxonomies. Various communication processes are related to crisis preparation and response – including decision making processes, risk awareness and management processes, crisis and emergency response processes, and outcomes and processes of renewal. Theories and best practices seek to foster crisis communication strategies that maintain and develop healthy stakeholder relationships, understand image and reputational assets, establish effective crisis leadership, and address other key functions for practitioners.

Do as I say, not as I do is a common phrase that applies to the case of Notre Dame’s president as he began the Fall 2020 semester chastising students for gathering in large groups off campus leading to the spread of COVID-19 while he, just a month later, gathered unmasked in the U.S. White House Rose Garden to celebrate the nomination of a Notre Dame alum to the Supreme Court. This study draws upon image restoration strategies in crisis response literature to examine Notre Dame and its president’s public response to both the two-week move to remote education in Fall 2020 following COVID-19 outbreak among its students and the unmasked attendance to an event that resulted in Notre Dame’s president testing positive for COVID-19. Overall, evasion of responsibility and corrective action typified the university’s response to students’ behaviors that led to public health risk, but mortification along with contradictory messages evading responsibility typified the individual response of the university’s president that led to public health risk. Of interest to the case is the lack of religious appeal intertwined in the image restoration strategies used in the president’s apology yet the use of religious appeal in the university’s accusations against student public health behavior. Given that Notre Dame is a religiously affiliated university and the president is clergy, the inconsistent use of religious appeal may undermine the image restoration rhetoric of the president.

The improvisations needed to adapt to COVID-19 teaching and learning conditions affected students and faculty alike. This study uses chaos theory and improvisation to examine an undergraduate communication research methods course that was initially delivered synchronously/face-to-face and then transitioned to asynchronous/online in March 2020. Reflective writings were collected at the end of the semester with the 25 students enrolled in the course and follow-up interviews conducted with six students. Thematic analysis revealed that available and attentive student-participant, student-student, and student-instructor communication complemented learner-centered and person-centered goals, but unavailable or inattentive communication, especially with participants and students in the research team, contributed to negative perceptions of learner-centered goals. Implications explore how communication research methods pedagogy may achieve greater available, attentive, and learner/person-oriented goals through modeling, resourcing, reflexivity, and appreciation in online and offline course delivery to enhance shifts in communication pedagogy, whether voluntarily or involuntarily initiated by faculty.

High reliability organizations (HROs) consistently operate relatively error‐free in high‐risk, fast‐paced, highly equivocal complex environments. Central to the enactment of high reliability is the communal versus individual nature of five heedful, or cognitive, processes, coined as collective mind. While applied broadly to organizations in high‐risk environments demanding safe collective activity, HROs and collective mind are applied more specifically to healthcare organizations and the high‐performing teams within them. Of interest is how HROs communicatively constitute safety cultures, coordinate through teamwork, learn, and navigate contradictions between tightly coupled formalized rules and hierarchies and the need for loosely coupled responses to hazards.