ABSTRACT
Working within the crisis communication, management communication, and public relations literatures, Coombs (1995, 1998, 1999a, 1999b) and colleagues (Coombs & Holladay, 1996, 2001, 2002, 2004; Coombs & Schmidt, 2000; Laufer & Coombs, 2007) have explicated a broad-based, prescriptive, and situational approach to organizational responses to crises. Central to their work is research on strategies for protecting organizational reputation, namely how an organization is perceived by its publics.
