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The aim of this paper is to study the development of a smoldering crisis over time. The focus is on a nationwide news media and online news communication related to a smoldering crisis running in the Danish healthcare system since 2016: the problematic implementation of a large-scale electronic health record (EHR), technology entitled Sundhedsplatformen (SP), in the hospitals of the capital region of Denmark.

Based on insights from crisis communication theories and in particular rhetorical arena theory (RAT), traces of SP smoldering crisis and patterns of discursive strategies are identified and explained from a longitudinal perspective to explain the communicative complexity that characterizes this smoldering crisis. To build an understanding of how this smoldering crisis is perceived, followed and kept alive, an analysis of (de)legitimation discursive strategies employed strategically by various actors and voices in news articles is conducted in relation to four communicative themes: issue identification, warnings, blame attribution and potential solutions.

It has been found that a legitimacy deficit emerges communicatively through specific (de)legitimation strategies during this smoldering crisis. New insights into RAT (Frandsen and Johansen, 2017) are also provided.

This study is not only of theoretical relevance, but it is also of practical relevance for public relation professionals who aim to identify characteristics of starting smoldering crises as well as to find strategic responses to the ongoing challenges and the developing over time of smoldering crises.

New insights into RAT (Frandsen and Johansen, 2017) are provided.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the literature on management and communication consulting in general, and crisis consulting in particular, by investigating how public relations and communications firms understand crises, crisis management, and crisis communication; how they see themselves practicing crisis consulting; and how they envisage the future of this field of expertise.

The study is based on 12 semi-structured in-depth expert interviews with CEOs, board members, senior consultants, and/or partners representing national and international public relations and communications firms operating in Denmark who offer crisis consulting as one of their areas of expertise.

Findings demonstrate that crisis consulting is a field in transition, moving away from the traditional focus on image crises in the media handled by former journalists, toward a new focus on issue crises involving other types of stakeholders. Findings also demonstrate that crisis consultants generate important insights into aspects of crisis management and crisis communication hitherto neglected by academic scholars.

The insights into the professional “world view” of crisis consultants will contribute to the professionalization of the field.

This is the first major study of crisis consulting as a specific field of expertise within the growing industry of management and communication consulting.

The purpose of this paper is to explore employees’ perceptions of enablers and barriers to engage in multi-vocal dialogues about ideas (ideation) on internal social media (ISM) within a context of corporate communication.

This exploratory study is based on four data sets: online observations of employee ideation on ISM from 2011 to 2018, semi-structured interviews and informal conversations with two managers (2015–2016), archival material, and semi-structured interviews with 14 employees (2017–2018) in a large, knowledge-intensive Danish organization.

The study identified various enablers and barriers to engagement related to psychological engagement conditions of meaningfulness, safety and availability. Managers’ communication role or importance of innovation, as well as tensions, e.g. obligation vs option to ideate or employee influence vs no influence, were identified as enabling or constraining employee engagement in ideation on ISM.

Broadening interviews to include employees who decided not to participate in online ideation would increase insights and nuance this study’s results.

Managers need to be aware of the psychological engagement conditions and balance identified enablers, barriers and tensions by acknowledging communication reciprocity on ISM. Not only employees, but also managers, are dialogue partners in employee ideation on ISM.

The study is one of the first to explore enablers of and barriers to psychological engagement conditions in a context central to corporate communication, namely internal innovation communication on ISM, and to study ideation from a coworker perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the discursive tactics that employees use when they speak up on internal social media (ISM) to gain support for their cause, and how this can develop into a “spiral of voice” when organizational members interact with each other on ISM.

The study is based on screenshots of four months of coworker communication on ISM in a Danish bank and on semi-structured interviews with 24 employees.

Employees succeeded in speaking up and gaining support on ISM by using eight different discursive tactics. These tactics helped move organizational issues from an operational to a strategic level, thus making the issues relevant for management as well as gaining the support of other coworkers. The visibility and persistence of communication on ISM forced managers to react.

Further research should investigate whether similar tactics and reactions occur in organizations with a less open communication culture where it might be less safe for employees to speak up.

Organizations need to be aware of the dynamics of the “spiral of voice” and of the way in which the visibility and persistence of communication on ISM forces managers to handle organizational issues.

This study is the first to explore what happens when employees speak up on ISM and to propose the concept of “a spiral of voice” as an extension of the theory of “the spiral of silence” (Noelle-Neumann, 1974).

The purpose of this paper is to study three apologies or statements offered by the Vatican and/or Pope Benedict XVI after a much‐debated lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany in 2006. The rhetorical model of apologizing and apologetic ethics proposed by Hearit is applied and tested in the study with the aim of expanding his theory.

The research design is qualitative and based on a case study methodology combining rhetorical criticism and ethics with crisis communication theory.

The analysis shows that although Hearit's approach allows us to both describe, explain and evaluate the apologies or statements offered by the Vatican and/or the Pope during the crisis, it does not take into account the globalizing context, or the more complex and less evident sociocultural order, into which their crisis communication is embedded.

The paper introduces and discusses the new concept of meta‐apology, i.e. an apology where the apologist is no longer apologizing for what he or she may have done wrong – because he or she does not have to, according to their own sociocultural order – but for the negative effects that the act committed by the apologist may possibly have caused.

Previous crisis communication research has primarily examined the external dimension of crisis communication, i.e. the crisis response strategies applied by organizations to protect and/or restore their image or reputation among external stakeholders in a crisis situation. The purpose of this paper is to set up an integrative framework for the study of internal crisis communication in private and public organizations.

The paper takes a theoretical approach reviewing the literature on crisis management and crisis communication and discussing the concept of internal stakeholder and the implications of a staged approach.

An integrative framework for the study of internal crisis communication is developed based on two assumptions: first, that internal crisis communication research must start with a detailed study of the relationship between an organization and its internal stakeholders (in this case: the employees) to clarify to what extent internal crisis communication differs from external crisis communication; and second, that internal crisis communication research can best be systematized applying a staged approach (precrisis stage, crisis event, postcrisis stage) as an heuristic method.

Apart from a few exceptions, the internal dimension of crises, crisis management, and crisis communication has, by and large, been unexplored.

The purpose of this paper is to provide context for and a preview of the content for the special issue on corporate apologia.

The methodology is a review of literature relevant to crisis communication and the role of apologia within this body of literature.

Apologia, a rhetoric of self‐defense, has a strong connection in the creation and development of crisis communication. Current research is moving beyond the parameters of apologia but it remains a strong influence on the field. Future crisis communication research needs to explore further the role of emotion if crisis communication and the implications of international crisis communication. The various contributions the articles in the special issue provide for crisis communication are reviewed as a means of previewing the special issue.

The paper provides lessons that crisis managers can apply when they need to communicate during a crisis.

The paper provides insights into the development of crisis communication and the role of apologia in that development.

Based on the assumption that the identity and self-understanding of an academic discipline determines how it conceptualizes different domains of social reality, including how it imports and/or exports concepts from or to other disciplines, this chapter presents some of the findings of a major ongoing comparative and cross-disciplinary study of how five key concepts within the combined fields of crisis management and reputation management are applied in three different disciplinary contexts. In this chapter, however, the focus is on just one of these concepts: the concept of reputation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the Telenor customer complaints crisis triggered on the company Facebook site in August 2012. More specifically, the paper focusses on how friends and enemies of a company interact, and how faith-holders serve as crisis communicators in a rhetorical sub-arena that opens up on Facebook.

The study is based on a textual analysis of 4,368 posts from the Telenor Facebook site, and an interview with the senior digital manager of Telenor.

Not only current and previous customers but also those from rival telephone companies were active in the Facebook sub-arena. The customers complaining about the company services were met not only with the response of Telenor, but also with counter-attacks from faith-holders acting in defense of Telenor. However, these faith-holders were using defensive response strategies, while Telenor used accommodative strategies.

Organizational crises need to be seen as a complex set of communication processes, including the many voices that start communicating from different positions, and taking into account not only the response strategies of the organization but also the response strategies applied by supportive emotional stakeholders. In practice, faith-holders need to be monitored, as they may prove useful as “crisis communicators.”

The paper provides insights into an under-investigated area of crisis communication: the strategies of faith-holders acting as “crisis communicators” defending a company and themselves against attacks from negative voices on social media.