Getting to grips with issues management and crisis communication

Books, seminars, workshops and journal articles on issues and crisis-related subjects abound---not to mention frequent media coverage of how issues or crises are affecting organisations and their publics. This high profile in itself might be enough to justify studying issues and crisis management: any fields so obviously part and parcel of organisational (and personal) life surely deserve critical examination. Webb (2004) argues that the need for crisis management and research has become more pronounced in the new millennium because over the past several decades, disasters have grown in frequency, magnitude and complexity. All of them present challenges to communicators: according to Benoit (1997), how successful an organisation is in its crisis management depends on what it says and does after the crisis hits. That brings in public relations, whose concerns include who is saying what, to whom, and with what intended effect. PR practitioners are expected to be skilled in message design and delivery, whether the aim is to manage an issue so it does not become a crisis or to mitigate the effects of a crisis event. They are also expected to be able to deal with the organisation's various publics, both reporting the publics' concerns to organisational leadership and communicating the leadership's policies and positions to the publics. These expectations mean there are a number of practical reasons why studying issues and crisis management is important