Proefschrift Crisis in aantocht! - Onderzoek - Hogeschool Utrecht

Summary
There’s a crisis on the way!
An interactional perspective
on crisis communication
This thesis addresses the issue of how special players (crisis entrepreneurs)
try to generate attention to a latent crisis and how government communication
can contribute to identifying and interpreting such a crisis.
In chapter 1, I show how crisis communication is an activity that is often
associated with organizations. This study takes a different view. It is based
on the concept that strategic crisis communication is used by those in
the immediate environment to achieve certain goals. In society, certain
individuals and groups can decide to oppose and denounce a given crisis.
Some of those involved often start signalling the risk of an impending
crisis before any such crisis has actually developed. In this study, I refer
to individuals who generate signals of this kind as ‘crisis entrepreneurs’.
These crisis entrepreneurs typically take the initiative when it comes to
airing their concerns about a potential crisis situation. However, such individuals
often have to deal with certain interactional problems that make it
difficult for them to raise the issue of a crisis. They have to deal with certain
‘interactional’ challenges, while running the risk that their signals will
not be picked up. For instance, they can be held responsible for raising the
problem in question. They can be accused of bearing some degree of personal
responsibility for the problem, through negligence, incompetence,
or laziness, for example. In this study, I have explored the way in which
crisis entrepreneurs issue signals. This is an attempt to identify the problems
that they encounter as they attempt to draw people’s attention to a
given crisis. The goal of this study is to enhance our understanding of crisis
entrepreneurs’ interactional problems. The study makes use of the ‘discursive
perspective’, which is based on the discursive psychological approach
developed in the 1990s by two British social psychologists, Derek Edwards
and Jonathan Potter. To date, this interaction-based approach has seldom
been used in the context of crisis communication.
Chapter 2 underlines the value of examining the way in which stakeholders
within an organization’s environment raise the issue of a crisis.
In terms of crises as a phenomenon, it is important to do justice to
the dynamics of risks and crises. In essence, this is about what happens
in the course of interactions. In such an environment, it is vital for an
organization to keep pace with those in its surroundings if it is to observe
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