Crisis as usual: Organizational dysfunction and public relations

As organizations face increasingly complex crisis situations, we must learn how to understand and manage them. The field of public relations is central to effective crisis management but it is often limited by a rationalistic and situationally bound perspective. Rather than viewing crisis as exception or accident, this paper focuses on way the organization's everyday culture and operating practices produce crisis. It argues for a critical approach to crisis management that incorporates an understanding of organizations as potentially dysfunctional or neurotic and crisis as integrally connected to organizational (dys)functions.