Peter M. Smudde

The Incident: Not Just Another Organizational Disruption

Issue and crisis: These concepts are well-understood, even though various definitions exist. A third concept, incident, is less defined. This article reports a content analysis of articles from two public relations journals (n = 67) and three prominent public relations industry publications (n = 56) to understand how incident is contextualized and applied. Findings reveal a statistically significant difference in how academic and industry publications contextualize the concept and expose a need for a formal conceptualization. Building on the results of the analysis, this article, then, argues that incident is (a) defined as a theoretical concept and pragmatic communication-management matter, (b) implemented within a continuum of organizational disruption, (c) presented as a necessary concept for greater precision for the reporting and analyzing of disruptive events, and (d) needs to be included in future scholarly research about and models of disruptive events.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims: Explicating the public tragedy as a public relations challenge

A tragedy is substantively different than an organizational crisis. Tragedies, whether man-made or natural disasters, have a considerably greater and singular impact than a traditional industry crisis, and current typologies of crises fail to account for organizations being impacted by and being obligated to respond to events of which they are neither the victim nor the perpetrator. Thus, tragedies require explication and, possibly, a different paradigm for public relations and crisis communication, both in industry response and academic scholarship. The goals of this article are threefold: First, use interdisciplinary scholarship to introduce and define the concept of public tragedy within the scope of public relations and crisis communication. Second, to discuss the motivations for and role of organizational involvement in the conversation surrounding a public tragedy, particularly for third-party organizations not directly impacted by an event, including the consequences and affordances of social media in tragedy response. Finally, the goal is to present recommendations for third-party public relations involvement in a tragedy.

Genre and Postemergency Contexts: The Nexus of Strategic Communications

This article explores why organizations choose to enact public relations discourse genres after an emergency situation —organizational crises, disasters, and issues—has been resolved. In the aftermath of emergency situations, we argue that organizational communicators employ discourse messages according to five governing “commitments,” which corporate officials use to shape postemergency messages the way they do. This essay, then, is not so much a retrospective analysis of what happened in selected emergency situations but, rather, is more a prospective explanation about how to use these five governing commitments when anticipating emergencies that could happen. Organizational learning and organizational renewal are addressed accordingly. In this argument we draw upon literature in linguistics, rhetorical theory, and organization studies. Examples of postemergency situations are used to bridge theory and practice to show how what was done retrospectively can be done prospectively to prepare for communication during postemergency contexts.