The social construction of crises in governmental and corporate communications: An inter-organizational and inter-systemic analysis

The paper analyzes the interplay between governmental and corporate crisis communications and how this in turn might lead to institutional changes in the specific case of the financial crisis (2008). The theoretical framework and empirical illustration enriches crisis communication theory in three ways: firstly by documenting how political and economic actors make sense of the crisis in their crisis narrations; secondly by analyzing how they attribute responsibilities and define solutions and consequences, which finally lead their actions and institutional processes; thirdly by investigating how they do this in relation to the micro-level (individual), meso-level (organizational) and macro-level (societal). The study demonstrates that the financial crisis is mostly inter-systemically and inter-organizationally co-constructed and points to the need of a more complex Processional Crisis Communication Theory (PCCT).