Author
Listed:
- Irina Stănciugelu
(Faculty of Communication and Public Relations, National School of Political and Administrative Studies, Bucharest, Romania)
Abstract
In the last decade, the growth of natural and manmade disasters has created unprecedented choices for people. As individuals, they must decide how to protect themselves and their families. As citizens, they must decide which policies best serve the nation’s desire for safety, economic growth, and social cohesion. Without good information the public may find that they have been denied alternative choices, and the lack of access to critical information may further complicate an already difficult situation. Risk perception also affects risk communication. Risk is a social construct which cannot be objectified and that an effective public communication system is essential for preventing and managing a crisis involving threats to the public. Risk and crisis communication is a persuasive based process that takes place in a context of fundamental ambiguity, confusion and speculation, conflicting beliefs and interests, and collective arousal. Considering the context, the persuasive based process could change fast in a concealed one, or to be perceived as such. Officials may sometimes see a greater advantage in concealment than exposure. They will engage in a specific form of impression management called ‘masking’: not telling the full story, downplaying the seriousness of threat, concealing sensitive aspects of the crisis management response. This study tries to evaluate the ethics of risk and crisis communication strategies from social responsibility point of view, and to point out the challenges that decision makers and their PR confront during the public communication process.
Suggested Citation
Download full text from publisher
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aes:icsrog:wpaper:44. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Lucian Onisor (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aseeero.html .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.