... are ineffective in consumer settings and that publicly apologizing for the event can somewhat mitigate the negative impact of PR disasters. Offering a causal explanation for the event is also important in order to avoid highly damaging intentional harm attributions. Originality/value Two streams of literature...

... of earlier studies of disaster. These studies were primarily concerned with how organisations and social groups responded to major events, usually natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires, floods and hurricanes (Elliott and Smith, 2004). Implicit within this approach was the view that disaster prevention...

... – a crisis – that forces the organization to reevaluate its behaviors, or to defend them by searching for an external cause to which the crisis can be attributed. Natural disasters, competitors, the government, and the economy can be convenient scapegoats, depending on the particular crisis...