In March 2020, the world witnessed an unprecedented crisis as COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic and countries shut down, instituting nationwide lockdowns. The pandemic came at a time when loneliness and social isolation were already becoming a concern. People switched to online communication using tools they've never used before, which opened new challenges for communicators who also had to adapt, including changing how they build relationships online. Crisis communication also changed, and numerous studies – including many published in this journal – showed how crisis communication was managed during and in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Crisis, whilst generally a popular area of research in public relations and corporate communications, became even more prolific with many scholars conducting studies on how communicators adapted to changes, vaccine hesitancy (Diers-Lawson, 2024), vaccine campaigning, etc. In this issue of Corporate Communications: An International Journal (CCIJ), papers look at a variety of issues, including conventional studies of crises related to product crises, social media crisis communication, employee-driven ethical crises, internal crisis communication, post-crisis discourses and renewal, planning strategic communication during the pandemic and other topics such as the role of trust, CEO activism, CEO communication, etc. All articles are linked to organisational communication, but the way I read papers has mainly left the notion of crisis and disruption in my mind. After reading these interesting papers, I was also left wondering how we can interpret findings on crisis communication in the context of human interpersonal relationships. What we continually miss in research is the focus on behaviour and how humans behind campaigns and crisis communication interpret crises, how they affect them and how working in crisis communication affects practitioners' well-being, emotions and interpersonal relationships.
Psychological research has shown that people started to struggle with interpersonal relationships even before the pandemic. For example, in 2019, a study found that 61% of Americans feel lonely, with the younger generation being particularly affected (Cigna, 2020). The pandemic exacerbated these issues, with many more people reporting negative consequences of social isolation and remote work, such as loneliness and psychological distress (Ernst et al., 2022), emotional and mental health concerns (de Mendonca et al., 2022), less satisfaction and more conflict in interpersonal relationships (Pauly et al., 2022) and less social support due to isolation (Ernst et al., 2022; Bueker and Horstmann, 2022; de Mendonca et al., 2022), and despite increased online communication and being able to keep in touch with people online, people reported difficulties with managing interpersonal relationships (Tillewein et al., 2025). Some studies are showing the impact of isolation on interpersonal relationships, with most individuals reporting negative effects of lockdowns on their interpersonal relationships, including young people (Khan et al., 2024; Tillewein et al., 2025).
These data made me think of the attribution theory developed in psychology, where research has focused on looking at how ordinary people explain the causes of events and behaviours. A formal definition has been provided by Fiske and Taylor (1991), who said, “Attribution theory deals with how the social perceiver uses information to arrive at causal explanation for events. It examines what information is gathered and how it is combined to form a causal judgement” (p. 23). Psychologists studied human behaviour using this theory to understand how people make sense of the social world because, according to psychological research, people tend to see cause and effect in relationships even when there is none (Heider, 1958). In crisis communication, attribution was conceptualised by looking at how people try to explain why events happen, particularly when events are sudden and tend to be negative. People attribute responsibility for the event to the situation or a person, and attributions generate emotions, which affect how people interact with those involved in the event (Coombs, 2014). People will either blame the organisation or the situation, and if people blame the organisation, this can instigate anger and negativity, leading to a crisis (Coombs, 2007, 2014, n.p; Coombs and Holladay, 2006). Coombs (1995) was the first to develop an application of the attribution theory to crisis management in public relations. He created a foundation for the theory-based approach to reputation repair crises, and a series of studies have subsequently tested and confirmed this theory. This research then evolved into a situational crisis communication theory (SCCT), also developed by Coombs (2007), which has been theorised, re-developed and published in this journal over many years.
SCCT argues that any crisis that has victims must have a response that includes providing instructions and information and a care response. For example, crisis managers should provide information for stakeholders on how to protect themselves during a crisis, and they should help stakeholders cope psychologically during a crisis (Coombs, 2007; Cooley and Cooley, 2011). Research has, over the years, studied SCCT and provided valuable insights into ways organisations respond to crises. However, what is missing is a behavioural approach to studying crises and understanding how crises affect practitioners, how they make sense of crises, and how their own sense-making affects crisis responses. If crisis managers need to help stakeholders cope psychologically during a crisis, how do they cope themselves? In addition, what is missing is understanding what kind of people cause organisational crises and why, which calls for further research by potentially merging the situational theory of publics with SCCT and focusing widely on the behaviour of practitioners and publics to fully understand crises and improve crisis responses. Whilst mainstream crisis research remains welcome to CCIJ, new and interdisciplinary approaches focusing on behavioural approaches to crises (and other corporate communications and public relations issues) are particularly welcome.
