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The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) on the outcome of construction projects and explore the moderating effects of emerging technologies on the relationship between COVID-19 and construction project outcomes.

Data for the study was collected through a Web-based, semistructured questionnaire. The responses of 62 construction practitioners were analyzed using a hierarchical linear regression model. The model consists of 16 independent variables, three control variables (organization size, organization type and project size), one moderator (adoption level of emerging technologies) and three dependent variables (project time, project cost and project quality).

The study confirms the negative significant impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the performance of construction projects. It also identifies the significant moderating effects of emerging technologies in mitigating the impact of COVID-19 on construction projects. Further, it shows a significant increase in the application of emerging technologies in construction projects during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the findings related to the moderating impact of the technology, this study provides a clear set of recommendations for construction firms, public sector and research community in combating the unavoidable situation similar to the COVID-19 pandemic in the future.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to identify the moderating role of technology on the impact of COVID-19 on the performance of the construction sector in Pakistan. The findings can also be used for the construction sectors of other developing countries.

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of the literature examining the relationship between automation and employment, with a focus on understanding the debates of automation displacement and enablement, and the mediating role of employee augmentation in driving organisational productivity.

A semi-systematic literature review was conducted across the areas of automation, work-design and employee skills over the past 3 years.

The academic literature was found to still be in its infancy, with empirical evidence in an organisational setting scarce. However, research suggests that automation does not cause job displacement or a negative impact on employment. In contrast, data suggest that automation leads to new job creation, task enlargement and skills enhancement. The findings suggest that organisations should employ augmentation alongside automation to drive productivity, in a way that promotes strong work-design, builds trust and leverages human creativity. A further recommendation is made for organisations to focus on continuous upskilling to combat the shortening shelf-life of skills and adapt to the constant change brought around by advances in automation.

Through a synthesis of diverse perspectives and academic evidence, this paper contributes to the nuanced understanding of the complexities surrounding automation and its impact on employment. This literature review underscores the need for organisational strategies that leverage augmentation to harness productivity savings, alongside a renewed focus on widespread employee skills enhancement. In addition to creating new recommendations for practitioners and organisational leaders, this paper also furthers the research agenda through a list of research gaps for scholarly attention.

The study aims to identify the extent to which industry 4.0 (IR4.0) adoption impacts the sustainable manufacturing (SM) performance of the manufacturing industry, focusing on the comparative analysis between developed and developing economies amid coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

The study proposes a conceptual model formed on seminal theories and literature using the cross-sectional design. For data collection, a purposive sampling method is used where 154 Malaysian (developing) and Australian (developed) manufacturing firms' data were collected. Partial least square-based structural equation modeling is employed to test the hypothesis and proposed research model.

This study finds that adoption of IR4.0 technologies does not directly influence the sustainability performance of the manufacturing industry, but rather the trajectories of SM (efficiency, flexibility, automation and big data and granularity) fully mediate the relationship between IR4.0 adoption and sustainability manufacturing performance. The comparative analysis between Australia and Malaysia shows no significant difference in the relationships or the framework; hence, the differences between developed and developing countries are not significant in this mechanism.

The study contributes to the insights of the managers regarding COVID-19 and the implementation of IR4.0 in the SM domain. The policymakers would further get better insights since the study pays attention to sustainable development goal, industry, innovation, infrastructure and responsible production.

Although situational crisis communication theory (SCCT) is centered on rationality and cognitive information processing, it ignores that people are also driven by irrationality and non-cognitive information processing. The purpose of this study aims to fill this gap by examining how gender stereotypes, based on perceived spokesperson sex influence the public’s perceptions of crisis response messages.

A 2 (industry type: automotive vs daycare industry) × 2 (spokesperson’s sex: male vs female) × 2 (crisis response appeal: rational vs emotional) between-subject online experiment was conducted to examine the effect of gender stereotype in crisis communication.

Results showed that either matching spokesperson sex with sex differed industry or matching sex differed industry with appropriate crisis response appeal can generate a more positive evaluation of the spokesperson and the organization. The results also revealed under which circumstances, the attractiveness of different sex of the spokesperson can either promote or mitigate people’s perceptions of the organization. Furthermore, when people are aware of a spokesperson’s sex, in a female-associated industry, a mismatching effect of a positive violation of a male-related stereotype overrides a matching effect of a female-related stereotype in crisis communication.

This study is among the first to identify how the gender of a spokesperson and industry type affect publics’ crisis response.

Though current literature has started to recognize the significant role that online faith-holders play in the context of brand reputation crises, extant research lacks a theoretical framework to explain the process in which online faith-holders endure the harm in brand reputation while collectively rebuilding the reputation. We propose and test a dual-challenge model for a more systematic understanding of faith-holder communities in brand reputation crises.

Focusing on collective-level communication activities, we quantitatively compared the volume, valence and variance of a faith-holder community’s communication (441,611 posts by 3,228 fans over 14 days) before and after a brand reputation crisis.

Our longitudinal data demonstrated that the crisis was a significant threat to group sentiment and cohesion. Nevertheless, the community was highly resilient and adaptive. Their emotions quickly recovered, and they promptly restored group cohesion and coordinated crisis response efforts after the crisis.

This study challenges the traditional assumption that online users are independent, static and reactive during brand crises. Instead, it conceptualizes online faith-holder community as a connected, proactive and dynamically adaptive group in crisis situations. This dual-challenge model highlights the importance of internally fostering collective resilience while externally coordinating crisis responses in a faith-holder community.

This study aims to investigate how disclosures through different communication media were used by the Australian mining company Rio Tinto to manage its reputation after the Juukan Gorge Cave Blast.

Case study research was used with a focus on a single case, Rio Tinto and the Juukan Gorge incident. Data on sustainability disclosures were collected from Rio Tinto’s website, corporate reports and social media platforms (Facebook, X and LinkedIn) for the 2020 and 2021 periods. Gioia methodology was applied to analyse disclosure strategies and an extended Reputation Risk Management (RRM) framework was used as a conceptual lens.

The findings reveal a slow and inappropriate initial response from the company resulting in negative reputational consequences for the company’s senior executives. Although the company’s initial response was to avoid responsibility and mitigate offensiveness, it gradually accepted full responsibility and adopted reparation strategies such as corrective action, mortification and stakeholder engagement to rebuild its reputation. The temporal analysis suggests that Rio Tinto was “left behind” as a result of its initial response, limiting the effectiveness of its subsequent RRM strategies.

The findings of this study contribute to an improved understanding of communication strategies for managing a reputation crisis. The extended RRM framework developed in this study provides a comprehensive list of various disclosure strategies that can be used in future studies that analyse disclosure post an environmental or social incident.

The findings of the study provide insights into the effectiveness of different communication strategies when communicating to stakeholders with varied interests. This study highlights that the timing of the response is critical to restoring lost reputation and a slow response which emphasises financial stakeholders at the expense of the affected communities can be detrimental to RRM, no matter how well-intentioned subsequent strategies are.

This research focuses on a marginal stakeholder group, Indigenous people and communities. The findings offer insights to society into whether corporate strategies to manage a reputation crisis promote and support equity and inclusivity.

This study focuses on a community-based stakeholder, Indigenous groups, a context that has unique cultural intricacies and requires a transition beyond a corporate perspective on RRM.

Following a crisis, stakeholders tend to appreciate costly organizational responses that attempt to reverse the harm caused by the organization. The deployment of reactive corporate social responsibility (CSR), defined as a CSR initiative explicitly promoted to make amends for a negative event, can thus be an effective crisis response strategy. However, existing studies suggest that this strategy could backfire, as it increases stakeholders’ skepticism regarding an organization’s motives to engage in CSR when this is only done under external pressure. Applying attribution theory, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the effectiveness of reactive CSR as a crisis response strategy depends on the positioning of the brand promoting it.

The authors use three between-subject experiments to test our hypotheses. In Studies 1 and 3, they consider a fictitious crisis scenario with a fictitious brand, and in Study 2, they test their hypotheses using existing brands involved in a fictitious crisis.

Compared to a purely verbal response (an apology), reactive CSR improves consumers’ responses when implemented by a brand positioned to focus on CSR rather than on performance. This effect is mediated by perceived brand benevolence: a brand focused on CSR is seen as more benevolent when proposing reactive CSR initiatives than a brand with a performance positioning. The effect holds even when the CSR positioning is not aligned with the reactive CSR domain. For a brand with a performance positioning, a costlier reactive CSR strategy is no more effective than an apology.

The study extends their understanding of how information on brand positioning influences reactive CSR in response to a crisis. Their analysis clarifies the circumstances under which reactive CSR can be an effective crisis response.

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly integrated into business operations at various levels, it offers not only new opportunities but also complex ethical challenges. These challenges often manifest as reputational risks when stakeholders perceive ethical missteps in the use of AI that can escalate into corporate crises.

Using a unique database of AI failures and related litigation, this chapter examines the emerging types of reputational issues and the corresponding crisis communications responses of companies engaging with AI, with the overarching goal of exploring the factors driving the various response strategies. This analysis contributes to the emerging field of AI ethics by explicitly linking it to crisis communication, highlighting the critical role of ethical considerations in managing reputational risk.

This study examines how top global brands changed their corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication on social media during a victim crisis, and how their CSR communication on social media influenced consumer sentiment.

Using 18,502 firms’ Facebook posts and their most relevant consumer comments from pre-pandemic and during-pandemic timeframes, this study integrates machine learning techniques (BERTopic) with human-based qualitative analysis to analyze CSR posts. It also measures the polarity and magnitude of consumer sentiment with Google Natural Language AI. We tested seven hypotheses using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM).

The machine learning-based topic modeling analysis showed that firms increased CSR communications intensity on social media and they more intentionally chose different CSR communication strategies for different topics on social media during the victim crisis. The hypothesis testing results show proactive, accommodative and interactive strategies have a significant impact on consumer sentiment polarity and magnitude, and these effects are moderated by the level of interactivity and industry type.

(1) This study takes a dynamic view to examine the firms’ CSR communication on social media during a victim crisis. It used machine learning-based text analytics and found many interesting results on how firms changed their CSR communication topics and strategies on social media during the crisis. (2) It measures both consumer sentiment polarity and sentiment magnitude to conduct sentiment analysis. The results indicate that the CSR communication strategies have different impacts on the two sentiment components. (3) It integrates machine learning techniques with human-based qualitative analysis. It shows how researchers can gain the benefits of both approaches.

The purpose of the study is to examine the relevance and application of green communication in management of the risks associated with moral outrage inducing crises. The study aims to identify how green communication mitigates both crisis risks and moral outrage. Additionally, the research discusses ethical and unethical green communication practices in the context of their impact on relationships between organizations and stakeholders during the crisis.

The study is designed as exploratory research. Available English-language journal articles and conference proceedings have been examined to investigate the role of green communications in crisis response contexts. The application of the search criteria and initial filtering yielded a total of 139 publications for further analysis. Following a detailed review and subsequent filtering, the final sample of 66 unique cases has been selected and analyzed in the context of Situational Crisis Communication Theory.

The systematic review and document analysis indicated multitude of significances of green communications in the context of the updated Situational Crisis Communication Theory. Moreover, a novel phenomenon has been identified: greenbleaching is exaggerated or fabricated usage of green communication to mitigate risks in the organizational crises caused by ESG-unrelated factors or events.

This study offers greenbleaching as a novel concept. Moreover, this is the first research that examines unethical green communication in the context of moral outrage inducing crises. Insights for researchers and practitioners regarding sustainability communication, green communication, and crisis communication ethics are also incorporated.