Section: Organisational and Strategic Communication
MAKING SENSE OF CRISIS COMMUNICATION: A STUDY OF EMPS AND CMPS IN MUNICIPALITIES
Finn FRANDSEN, Aarhus University
Winni JOHANSEN, Aarhus University
Since the beginning of modern crisis management research in the 1980s, there has been a large interest in applying a strategic, proactive and process-oriented approach to handling organizational crises (Fink, 1986, Pauchant & Mitroff, 1992). Practitioners and academics have in particular focused on the pre-crisis stage including signal detection, prevention and crisis preparation (Coombs, 2012). Concerning crisis preparation, there has been a lot of talking and writing about the importance, structure and content of crisis management plans (Barton, 1993, Caywood & Stocker, 1993, Marra, 1998, Weick and Sutcliffe, 2007). However, we still only know very little about how real world crisis management plans look like, how they are produced, how they are structured, and how they are activated in a crisis situation. Nikolaev (2010) is one of the very few researchers who have actually subjected crisis management plans to empirical study analyzing crisis communication plans of major American companies (provided by PRSA or IABC).
The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we want to study to what extent emergency management plans (EMPs) and crisis management plans (CMPs) from Danish municipalities are concerned with matters of crisis communication to external and internal stakeholders. Second, we want to study how meaning is ascribed to crisis communication by the actors responsible for the establishment or execution of these plans. An EMP or CMP is not just a functional tool. It is also a textualization of the perceptions and expectations of an organization concerning issues such as: What constitutes a crisis to the organization, how is a crisis expected to unfold and how important is crisis communication for the course of events? In this sense, an EMP or CMP is also a witness of specific organizational “habits of mind”. According to Weick & Sutcliffe (2001): “What people forget is that plans act the same way as expectations. They guide people to search narrowly for confirmation that the plan is correct”.
The research design consists of two parts: 1) A quantitative and qualitative content analysis of a corpus of EMPs and CMPs collected from the 98 municipalities in Denmark. The content analysis concentrates on the articulation and understanding of crisis communication as it appears from the plans. 2) Four qualitative interviews with selected actors (who have established or work with the EMPs and CMPs in question), in which they make sense of the plans and the relevant sections on crisis communication. The study is part of a larger collaborative research project on internal crisis management and crisis communication funded by the Danish Research Council for Social Sciences (cf. Frandsen & Johansen, 2011, Johansen, Aggerholm & Frandsen 2012, and Frandsen, Aggerholm & Johansen, in press). It builds on a unique empirical set of data collected in 2011 and 2012. So far researchers have only focused on best practice documents in stead of real life documents.