Public relations crisis communication

Ever since Edward L. Bernays in Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) substituted ‘propaganda’ with the more positive term ‘Public Relations’ coined by Thomas Jefferson (Davis cited in Gonçalves, 2014, p. 100) a multitude of definitions and interpretations of the term have been generated. These include Aristotle’s early work on rhetoric to the nineteenth-century war-related propaganda and more recently the professionalisation of public relations as a management function.