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Crisis Communication and Organizational Legitimacy

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Handbook of Business Legitimacy

Abstract

Drawing on two major reviews of the academic literature on organizational legitimacy, the aim of this chapter is to examine how crisis communication scholars have adopted and applied the concept of organizational legitimacy since the early 1990s. More specifically, the chapter addresses the following issues: How do crisis communication researchers define organizational legitimacy? How can a potential crisis damage the legitimacy of an organization, and how can the organization mitigate this damage by managing its legitimacy before, during, and after the crisis? Last, but not least, why do crisis communication researchers seem to have lost interest in organizational legitimacy in favor of reputation after the year 2000?

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Correspondence to Finn Frandsen .

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Frandsen, F., Johansen, W. (2019). Crisis Communication and Organizational Legitimacy. In: Rendtorff, J. (eds) Handbook of Business Legitimacy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68845-9_27-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68845-9_27-1

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