Crisis Communication

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, scholars from the fields of journalism, communication, management, and psychology paid increased attention to communication efforts that take place before, during, and after organizational crises and other events likely to instigate negative reactions on the part of the public. This subset of communication has come to be known as crisis communication—the construction and dissemination of public messages in the event of organizational incidents, natural disasters, accidents, and other incidents likely to induce fear, anxiety, or unrest. Crisis communication is often delineated from risk communication in that crisis communication deals specifically with events that have taken place as opposed to the risk of events occurring in the future. Given that crisis communication has emerged from several academic traditions, numerous approaches to the study of these messages and their effectiveness can be found in the extant literature. Each of these approaches sheds insight on a particular aspect of the crisis communication process, such as the actions inside an organization, audience response, message construction, or stakeholder relations. This bibliography attempts to capture key works across all of these traditions and is divided into several components. A list of key overview texts is presented along with information regarding journals in which much of the essential scholarship in the field can be found, a series of studies defining the parameters of the field is included, and essential studies in the field are discussed in two sections. One section presents studies that examine crisis communication from several leading methodological perspectives, the other the key studies concerning the prevailing theoretical perspectives in the field.