The Handbook of Crisis Communication

While painful at times, the creation of the Handbook of Crisis Communication has been a labor of love. All of the authors have contributed their labor through their passion for crisis communication. Passion and research are two concepts that exist in a binary relationship. Crisis communication seems to evoke passion, perhaps because of the emotion embedded in the topic. Crises are emotional events for those involved. Consider employees experiencing an industrial accident, customers suffering from a harmful product, or people displaced by a natural disaster. The Handbook contains examples of these and many other crises that trigger emotions and realizations of vulnerabilities for the researchers as well as their readers. There should be empathy because any researcher or reader can easily become a crisis victim. All it takes is a change in the weather, e. coli in a taco, or salmonella in your peanut butter to become a crisis victim. The bottom line is that we all have a stake in making crisis communication as effective as possible. People, including family, friends, and ourselves, can benefit when crisis communication is effective, or suffer when it is flawed. A primary goal of this volume is to improve the practice of crisis communication.