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To examine the post 9/11 communication of the bond‐trading firm, Cantor Fitzgerald and its CEO Howard Lutnick, according to the discourse of renewal framework.

This case‐study of the discourse of renewal draws upon the messages and statements made by the company and its employees following the 9/11 attacks. The discourse of renewal framework emphasizes provisional responses, prospective statements, and the role of the leader as a symbol of stability in the face of a crisis.

This study provides support for viewing crisis as change‐inducing events with the potential to fundamentally alter the form, structure and direction of an organization. Renewal discourse helped the company survive an attack where over 600 employees were killed and the company offices completely destroyed. While a crisis inevitably create severe harm, it also has the potential to serve as a renewing force for the organization.

Few examples of post‐crisis discourse of renewal have been examined in the literature and more research is needed. Work needs to identify the conditions necessary for this kind of discourse.

Organizations may have the opportunity to fundamentally reframe a crisis, focusing on the opportunities that arise from these events.

This paper explores both organizational crisis and organizational discourse from unique positions. Discourse is positioned as the means whereby crisis can become a positive force for change

This study investigates the processes that the US universities and colleges used to learn during the COVID-19 pandemic and the factors that facilitated and impeded their learning processes.

To address this study’s research questions, this study used a crisis communication and learning lens to interview crisis response team members from 30 US higher education institutions in May 2020 (the first pandemic semester). In October 2020 (the second pandemic semester), this study conducted follow-up interviews with 25 of the original interviewees. Overall, this study conducted 55 interviews.

Learning during the COVID-19 pandemic is facilitated by a recognition of a serious deficiency in the current system and impeded by the need to act quickly. The findings demonstrate the process by which decisions, actions and strategies emerged during crises.

This investigation illustrates how crises can prompt organizational learning while demonstrating the critical role of internal and external resources in the learning process.

This paper aims to examine the contribution that discourse analysis can make to understanding organizational change.

It identifies five key contributions. Discourse analytic approaches: reveal the important role of discourse in the social construction of organizational change; demonstrate how the meaning attached to organizational change initiatives comes about as a result of a discursive process of negotiation among key actors; show that the discourses of change should be regarded as intertextual; provide a valuable multi‐disciplinary perspective on change; and exhibit a capacity, to generate fresh insights into a wide variety of organizational change related issues.

To illustrate these contributions the paper examines the five empirical studies included in this special issue. It discusses the potential for future discursive studies of organizational change phenomena and the implications of this for the field of organizational change more generally.

Provides an introduction to the special issue on discourse and organizational change.

The purpose of this paper is to extend current theories in crisis communication, by developing a more systemic approach to understanding the role of emotions in crises and the strategies organizations can use to respond. The authors' integrated crisis mapping (ICM) model is premised on a public‐based, emotion‐driven perspective where different crises are mapped on two continua, the organization's engagement in the crisis and primary public's coping strategy.

Content analysis was used to analyze 259 stories in US mainstream newspaper covering five different crisis cases.

The initial test suggests theoretical rigor. It found that publics involved in crises pertaining to reputational damage, technological breakdown, industrial matters, labor unrest, and regulation/legislation, are likely to feel anxious, angry, and sad. At the same time, they are likely to engage in conative coping.

Understanding publics' emotions in crisis is a rarely studied area. This model is arguably the first to suggest a framework of emotions. This study is the first of a series of tests to generate what Yin termed “analytic generalization” for the ICM model.

This manuscript reports an exploratory investigation to integrate emotions into the study of post-crisis communication. Using the discussion of the role of affect in Attribution Theory, the research integrates emotion into Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT), one approach to post-crisis communication. SCCT uses crisis responsibility, how much people believe the organization is responsible for the crisis, to determine the most effective post-crisis communication strategy for protecting the organization's reputation. The research examines the amount of sympathy, anger, and schadenfreude generated by a variety of crisis types. The focus is on the connection between these three emotions and perceptions of crisis responsibility. The results suggest how emotion can be integrated into post-crisis communication and supports the value of including emotion in future research.

Can sustainability disclosures be a tool for executing image restoration strategies after corporate manslaughter? This is the question explored in this study of Costa Crociere's sustainability reports after the Concordia disaster.

Merging traditional textual content analysis with visual analysis and supported by machine learning tools, this is a predominantly qualitative study framed by legitimacy theory, image restoration theory and impression management.

Costa Crociere's voluntary sustainability reporting is strongly influenced by a mix of text and visual signals that distract readers' attention from the disaster. A “nothing really happened” communication strategy pervades the disclosures, with the only rational motivation being to change perceptions and erase memories of this tragic and avoidable event.

Although the analysis covered multiple sources of corporate information, media coverage was not one of them. A more in-depth exploration of sustainability reporting in the cruise industry, including evidence of similar cases, to test impression management theory would be a worthwhile avenue for future research.

While Costa Crociere technically followed the customary guidelines of disclosing human resource impacts, there was almost no acknowledgement of the people involved in the accident. Costa Concierevastly understated their responsibility for the accident, did not apologize, and conveyed very little remorse. The majority of disclosures centred on disaster recovery management.

The authors discuss why and how a company can overcome a legitimacy threat by completely freezing its voluntary sustainability reporting, and the authors show how a company can restore its image by minimizing specific aspects of an accident and shifting attention from the human victims to corporate operations. Incorporating image recognition driven by AI models and combining the results with narrative disclosures contributes an innovative and original analysis technique to the field of impression management. In addition, this research also contributes to our knowledge on the cruise industry – a sector currently under scrutiny for its ethical, social and environmental practices.

Although Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) is the most commonly diagnosed sexually transmitted infection in the USA, much controversy exists with respect to HPV vaccination, especially among parents of adolescents. Previous research has shown that exemplars in the media influence public opinion estimates about controversial social issues. However, little is known about the underlying psychological processes of how exemplars influence public opinion formation. The purpose of this paper is to systematically explore such psychological processes based on the projection theory. To this end, the important yet controversial public health issue, the mandatory HPV vaccination, was chosen.

A two-factor (exemplar vs proportion), between-subject experiment was conducted using online newspaper articles as main stimuli. A total of 138 participants completed the study. The analytical framework comprised the Sobel test with the Bootstrap method and a series of Ordinary Least Square hierarchical regression analyses.

The higher the proportion of exemplars against the HPV vaccination in a news article was, the greater the number of individuals who became opposed to it was. And the high personal opposition translated into negative public opinion change estimation.

The findings indicate that news exemplars may influence individuals’ personal opinion formation, and, in turn, contribute to their estimations of future public opinion climate, as suggested by the projection theory. Theoretical, methodological and practical implications for journalists, health educators and policy makers are discussed.

The paper aims to propose a reinterpretation of corporate apologia and social legitimacy from theoretical perspectives of phenomenology and Foucault's theory of discipline.

The reinterpretation proposed in this paper is based on diagnostic theories aimed at making improvements by guiding practice in a determinate direction and by providing a basis for criticizing practice. The author also provides examples of adequate and inadequate corporate apologia along with the theoretical framework proposed in this paper.

Besides shouldering responsibility corporations cannot help becoming disciplined subjects in order to re‐establish legitimacy with the public.

The paper proposes a view of corporate apologia as self‐discipline for corporations that have undergone mishaps in order to reestablish legitimacy. Some examples of Japanese multinational corporations, such as Toyota and Toshiba, are included to contextualize abstract ideas.