Crisis Typologies Revisited: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Abstract

For effective crisis management and communication, a decision maker has to understand the causes and nature of a crisis and how it influences stakeholder perceptions. Identifying an organization's vulnerabilities is essential for crisis prevention but practitioners often lack the ability to define crisis scenarios, especially the worst-case ones. A crisis typology is a structured approach to analyze crisis situations and to introduce measures for crisis prevention and containment. This paper aims to review recent literature on crisis classifications and to discuss their application. Because a single typology cannot capture the complexity and the interdisciplinary nature of a crisis, four relevant typologies from different disciplines are compared. Their combined application in an interdisciplinary framework is suggested. The paper discusses the need for typologies that reflect the cultural and contextual dimensions. Conclusions concerning the limitations and directions for further research are drawn.

Appropriate Governance Responses to Infectious Disease Threats: Developing Working Hypotheses

“…We adhere to Björk's statement that “Crisis management and communication require strategic thinking, and a critical important first step is the proper identification of a crisis situation … This is the area where problems usually begin” (Björck, , p. 25). We thus need to better understand the task (in our case the crisis threat) before starting to think about the response to the threat (Coombs, ).…”

“…As mentioned before, there are scarcely any typologies available for crises, while those available have a confusing feature, in that they conceptually integrate type of threat and type of response. Although Björck (2016) has made an important contribution in pointing to the necessity of considering types of crisis and assessing the usefulness of four existing crisis typologies, he advocates a typology which combines the different aspects in one typology (e.g., including the type of crisis in terms of predictability and the implications for response). Such a typology has at least two disadvantages.…”

Interdisciplinary Understanding of a Crisis: Towards an International Crisis Classification Matrix

“…For effective crisis preparation, a decision maker has to understand the causes and nature of a crisis and how it influences stakeholder perceptions. A pragmatic approach consists of the analysis and classification of experienced and observed crises, and the associated management and communication actions [2]. A critical first step is the proper identification of a crisis situation [3].…”

“…The field of crisis typologies has produced numerous classification attempts, but none is sufficient to capture adequately the complexity of a crisis event, because of its interdisciplinary nature [9]. [2] compared existing classifications from four key disciplines that delivered insights on individual crisis characteristics such as cause, impact, control, and stakeholder perceptions (see Figure 2). But every typology is isolated in the logic of the rooted discipline.…”

“…Realistic and thus usable crisis scenarios depict not only separate elements but a sum of substantial crisis determinants: cause, impact, stakeholder perceptions as well as suitable crisis management and communication actions [2]. An interdisciplinary approach allows a decision maker to assess crisis situations from different angles, to apply scenario planning and to formulate strategic alternatives.…”