ABSTRACT
What should an oil company do following an oil spill by one of its tankers? How should a university respond to a lawsuit claiming that it discriminates against women? What kinds of messages will be most effective in regaining consumer trust following food poisoning at a restaurant belonging to a national chain? In this chapter, I discuss how organizations and their spokespersons may use perception management effectively following such crisis events. Public relations researchers have studied crisis events for decades, and these types of events comprise the bulk of the cases studied by organizational perception management researchers over the past 20 years (see Pearson & Clair, 1998, for a review).
