英语论文网

Recent years have witnessed a number of corporate crises, ranging from United Airlines’ failure of customer service and the data breach of Equifax to KFC’s shortage of chicken, all of which have created uncertainty, threatened the companies’ priority goals (Dean, 2004), and endangered the overall reputation of the companies (Barton, 1993). Facing these challenges, corporations need to formulate and deliver responses to their stakeholders and the general public effectively so as to protect their corporate reputations (Coombs, 1999).

英语论文范文怎么写

The most common theoretical instrument in crisis communication research is image restoration theory, which is considered as a dominant paradigm for crisis communication (Ulmer, Seeger, & Sellnow, 2007). For corporate crisis communication, by far, the most crucial and public stage of crisis communication is post-crisis communication stage, as at this stage, crises usually involve the possibility of negative publicity, which endangers the very foundation of a corporation’s image (Dardis & Haigh, 2009; Dean, 2004). Many scholars (Kimberly & L, 2002; Muralidharan, Dillistone, & Shin, 2011) have attempted to explore effective crisis response strategies to mitigate negative consequences and reduce reputational risk, and making an apology has been claimed to be the most effective crisis response strategy to restore the accused’s image.(Koehn, 2013; Lee & Chung, 2012; Meng & Pan, 2013; Sandlin & Gracyalny, 2018).

1.2 Research significance

A corporate image is vulnerable in the face of allegations of offenses or wrongdoings, thus, when a scandal occurs, most corporations turn to crisis communication to reduce the effects of negative publicity on their corporate images (Benoit, 1997b; Gilpin, 2008; Griffin, 2009; Valdebenito, 2013; Vanhamme & Grobben, 2009). As apology has become the most prevalent crisis response strategy, many practitioners have made use of apology/mortification as the “best” crisis response strategy to protect a corporation’s image and reputation after a crisis (Benoit & Drew, 1997). While several studies have been done on how apology strategies work in the image restoration discourses posted by corporations in troubles (Benoit & Czerwinski, 1997; Grimmer, 2017; Muralidharan et al., 2011; Weber, Erickson, & Stone, 2011), few studies focus on how companies employ the apology strategy to restore their images in cross-cultural conditions. Thus, the current study aims to explore the differences of apology strategies employed by corporations from different cultures by contrasting apology strategies and linguistic devices employed in Chinese and American car companies’ apologies, hoping to provide further studies with some hints of exploring cross-cultural corporate apologies.

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Crisis communication approach to apologies

Crisis communication is usually associated with what is said by an organization during and after a crisis. The emphasis is on what the organization says and does in response to the crisis (Ben本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。