International Crisis Communication in Theory & Practice [SS 21]

In times of globalization, organizations expand their activities from their home country to many other guest countries, i.e. they act internationally. As a consequence, public relations (PR) activities need to be aligned internationally and be adapted to a variety of language and cultural areas. Questions about the strategic organization of PR in the multinational are at the heart of international PR research. Similarly, global form-giving processes in communication management have implications for crisis PR. Next to fast, precise and event-specific communication in crisis situations, organizations need to account for different societal and cultural regions in their communication strategy. In our seminar, we address the question of how the two research fields of international PR and crisis PR can be linked by organizational theory. In addition, we fructify the implications of our theoretic discussion for the practice of communication management by working on case studies.