Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management最新文献

This study examines opinion leadership and information diffusion on Twitter (X) during crisis periods with high epistemic uncertainty among the public. By analysing a tweet dataset captured during a unique COVID-19 period marked by conflicting face mask guidelines, we explore how crisis situations like this reshape social media influence dynamics. Our findings reveal complex and paradoxical relationships between traditional indicators of opinion leadership and actual influence, mediated through engagement metrics. Content relevance and engagement patterns can outweigh traditional user attributes in determining influence, with non-traditional opinion leaders emerging through creative, highly engaging crisis-related posts. A network structure of community clusters with limited cross-community flow further defines influence pathways. Our study highlights the importance of flexible, distributed models of online crisis information diffusion that consider the dynamic interplay between user attributes, network topology, engagement patterns and contextual factors. These insights also suggest potential benefits in exploring more adaptive, context-sensitive approaches to managing information flow in digital environments during crises.

Pre-disaster protective actions play a crucial role in mitigating disaster risks and enhancing resilience. Using data from Taiwan, China, this study examines how the degree and type of disaster-induced damages influence protective actions. The findings reveal the following: (1) The extent of disaster damage, rather than merely experiencing a disaster, motivates individuals to engage in protective actions. (2) Economic and financial losses are the primary drivers of public protective actions, compared to other types of losses. (3) The study distinguishes between binary variables (the presence or absence of protective actions) and continuous variables (degree of preparedness) to assess the varying impacts of different factors. Risk perception is found to mediate the relationship between disaster damage and both the presence and extent of protective actions. Meanwhile, resilience only moderates the relationship between risk perception and the presence or absence of protective actions. (4) Information sources and perceptions of government authority significantly influence both the likelihood and extent of protective actions. However, trust in government and social capital do not exert any influence in this regard. This study advocates for targeted interventions for individuals severely affected by disaster-related financial losses and emphasizes the need to enhance protective actions through diverse information channels.

Effective crisis communication is important for governments to mitigate the impact of disasters and maintain public trust. This study examines the Chinese government's social media crisis response during the 2021 Zhengzhou rainstorm, developing a government crisis frame model to analyze 10,036 Weibo posts across 73 government accounts. The findings reveal three dominant framing strategies: Disaster Reporting and Information Updates, Leadership and Disaster Relief, and Achievement, which collectively highlight institutional competence and phased progress to cultivate public confidence. Additionally, the government strategically amplified emotional appeals through the Human Interest and Encouragement frame, fostering collective political emotions and social cohesion, while the Severity frame appeared far less frequently. Notably, while the Inviting the Public frame had the strongest communication effect, it was the least utilized. The association between the government sector and effect is relatively weak and becomes insignificant after controlling for follower count and crisis stage. While the government level significantly and positively influences the communication effect, provincial-municipal differences were marginal, reflecting that high economic capital enables municipal media to achieve autonomy comparable to provincial actors. These results reveal the Chinese government's strategic use of social media to achieve integrative consensus and collective resilience. This research provides empirical evidence of the Chinese government's crisis communication strategies on social media and offers a methodological framework for analyzing government crisis responses in the digital era, contributing to the broader discourse on political communication.

As an important branch of organisational learning, crisis learning can play a unique function in enhancing resilience in the field of disasters. However, the current knowledge and research on the relationship between crisis learning and disaster resilience are very limited. By establishing the research framework of the “Subject-Process-Resilience Capacity” of crisis learning, this paper indicates that resilience in the disaster field can be improved by the multiple subjects of the social system through crisis learning behaviour in the whole process of responding to disasters. Through the longitudinal comparative analysis of a case of two flood disasters caused by rainstorms in Shouguang County, this study found that the subjects of crisis learning are not only public departments and governments, but also market subjects, social organisations and individuals. These multiple subjects can adopt different crisis learning behaviours before, during and after disasters, so as to improve the preventive, response and recovery capabilities of disaster resilience. In addition, the causal relationship between crisis learning and disaster resilience explored in this paper can also help enrich the connotation of resilience in the field of disaster research and provide reference value for social systems to enhance their resilience to natural disasters.

The growing demand for using AI in day-to-day work in the communication industry brings ethical threats to organisations (i.e., misinformation, discrimination and bias, lack of transparency and disclosure, privacy violation and infringement, and copyright infringement). Meanwhile, organisational communication management also faces threats posed by external AI-driven disinformation. The internal and external threats boost the urgency of strategy development for effective organisational crisis management. This study, based on an online survey of communication professionals in the US (N = 407), provides timely input to organisations on how to manage AI-related ethical threats from inside and outside by understanding the perspective of communication practitioners. Building upon extant ethical AI challenges and the theoretical framework of the problem of many hands, this study examines communication professionals' attitudes and perceptions toward both AI ethical threats and strategies proposed to manage those threats, and the predictors of their behavioural intentions regarding threat management. We found that communication practitioners have reservations about being fully transparent about AI use to their clients. To effectively address AI ethical threats, organisations need to consider building a culture of active responsibility to prevent responsibility evasion and impunity, enhancing communication practitioners' awareness and knowledge about the pitfalls of technical systems, and improving practitioners' perceived efficacy of strategies for managing AI ethical threats.

Risk information represented by the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) has garnered significant attention as a foundation for individuals to appraise threats and engage in protective actions. Although many opportunities exist to provide risk information to the public in a permanent form, little attention has been paid to active information-seeking behaviour. This study investigates the primary factors influencing the intent to seek information within the context of COVID-19 and delves into the mechanisms of the information-seeking process. We utilize a snowball sampling method to collect data. A total of 1300 people were selected from three universities, five companies, one hospital, and the local government as respondents. Based on a prior risk information-seeking model, a hypothetical model was developed that accentuates the pivotal role of affective states and cognitive conditions (encompassing perceived risk and perceived knowledge). The empirical results underscore the significance of cognitive states in forecasting affective and informational responses. Surprisingly, the intent to seek information is directly influenced by perceived knowledge but not by perceived risk. Additionally, information needs play a mediating role in the information-seeking process, underscoring the complex dynamics of seeking information in the context of COVID-19.