The Incident: Not Just Another Organizational Disruption

Abstract

Issue and crisis: These concepts are well-understood, even though various definitions exist. A third concept, incident, is less defined. This article reports a content analysis of articles from two public relations journals (n = 67) and three prominent public relations industry publications (n = 56) to understand how incident is contextualized and applied. Findings reveal a statistically significant difference in how academic and industry publications contextualize the concept and expose a need for a formal conceptualization. Building on the results of the analysis, this article, then, argues that incident is (a) defined as a theoretical concept and pragmatic communication-management matter, (b) implemented within a continuum of organizational disruption, (c) presented as a necessary concept for greater precision for the reporting and analyzing of disruptive events, and (d) needs to be included in future scholarly research about and models of disruptive events.

Notes

¹Disaster and emergency communication are also discussed within the realm of crisis communication. As distinct fields, and more centered on governmental rather than organization response to dangerous and life-threatening events, they also focus both in practice and nomenclature on threat events of significant impact (Coombs, 2012, pp. 54–64).