Investigating Political and Technological Contexts in Crisis Communication : China and Beyond

Summary, in English

This study aims to theoretically advance the current context-oriented tradition in crisis communication by highlighting the political and technological contexts to understand organizational crises. Using China as a case, this study proposes a broader research agenda that expands the focus from individual, organizational, and cultural domains to political and technological domains for investigating the impact of societal contexts on crisis communication. The research agenda includes, First, the examination of the authoritarian regime with a divided power structure as the political context in China. Assessing political-structural and political-historical contexts allow a more comprehensive understanding of contextual influences on crisis communication temporally and structurally. Second, the agenda scrutinizes the cacophony of social media users’ voices in a government-regulated commercial space as the technological context in China. Online participation and internet language are thereby emerged as prominent parts of technological contexts in understanding crisis communication in China. Together, these two aspects provide a research agenda for understanding organizational crises at the societal level, as these crises arise within discrete political and technological structures and yet clearly overlap in numerous respects and across various realms. The implications and directions of research on the influences of political and technological contexts on organizational crises in China are also discussed.