Embracing Opportunity and Bracing for the Future: Renewal Discourse and Inoculation

Abstract

This paper explores the potential to address mid-crisis communication needs in longitudinal crises by using a paired renewal discourse and inoculation messaging strategy. While renewal discourse focuses on inherent opportunities and the possibility for organizations to improve following a crisis, insulating stakeholder views from ongoing and future crisis effects with inoculation messaging during the crisis can improve the durability of positive outcomes. Theoretically driven rhetorical analysis is used to examine stakeholder communication from one of the two firms that survived The Weekend Wall Street Died in September 2008, a midpoint in the 18-month global financial meltdown. The results demonstrate mid-crisis as a distinct communication exigency and the applied use of a paired renewal discourse and inoculation strategy as a crisis and ongoing risk management approach.

Keystone theories of postcrisis discourse: Communication Theory of Resilience and Discourse of Renewal

“…Like the Communication Theory of Resilience, Discourse of Renewal Theory is a later entrant into the risk and crisis communication field. In recent years, DRT has been used as an explanatory tool in a wide range of postcrisis analyses (see Carlson, 2018; Dillingham, 2023; Du Plessis, 2018; Herovic & Veil, 2016; Littlefield et al, 2009; Manzie, 2018; Reierson & Littlefield, 2012; Sellnow et al, 2017; Slagle et al, 2022). Its popularity is a function of an expansive, positive, and forward‐looking orientation compared with other frameworks.…”