Revisiting contingency theory in regenerative social-mediated crisis: An investigation of Maxim’s and Yoshinoya in Hong Kong’s polarized context

Highlights

• Provided real-case data to explicate the regenerative crisis in a polarized context.

• Identified contingent factors salient to influence the organizational choice.

• Discussed the rationale for avoidance as an organizational crisis response stance.

• Emphasized the roles of external publics and social media environment in crisis communication.

• Deepened the argument on the strategic conflict management for polarized social-mediated crises.

Abstract

This research investigates how the social media-based crisis response of two organizations operating in a specific polarized context unfolds along a regenerative crisis lifecycle in line with the contingency theory of accommodation. By analyzing two crises that affected the Maxim’s and Yoshinoya groups during the Hong Kong social unrest in 2019, the paper commits to explicate how internal, socio-environmental, and external publics’ factors shape the communication patterns of the crisis. By focusing on Facebook posts and information available online, this study examines how the two selected organizations responded to specific crisis situations, and how publics reacted during the regenerative crisis lifecycle. Results show that Maxim’s took the advocative, while Yoshinoya engaged in the accommodative stance initially. Then, they both turned to an avoidance stance to deal with active online publics with opposing political stances. Contingent factors driving the organizations to adopt specific stances were relevant to internal members, organizational characteristics, social media environment, and external publics. Results provide insights about the complexities organizations face to respond to online publics in regenerative social-mediated crises. They also advance the contingency theory by refining the advocacy-accommodation stance continuum, re-defining contingent factors, and explicating the interactive effects of contingent factors on organizational response decision making in a polarized and social-mediated context.

Introduction

This article is included in the Public Relations Review special section on the contingency theory of strategic conflict management. The contingency theory of accommodation (Cancel, Cameron, Sallot, & Mitrook, 1997) is a public relations (PR) theory that has been widely embraced to study conflict and crisis management. By suggesting that organizations and publics communicate dynamically, the theory proposes 87 internal and external contingent variables that help PR practitioners identify the factors that foster organizational change and the elements that generate changes in communication strategies when managing conflicts. In line with this theory, communication response stances can be identified on a continuum between advocacy and accommodation. However, most of the extant studies have not explicitly focused on the dyadic factors to test the organization-public relationships (OPR) (Cheng Y, 2019).

In a world where global polarization is becoming a trend that can impact both organizations and publics, especially on social media platforms (Lee et al., 2018, Lee et al., 2018, Wang et al., 2017), people increasingly perceive reality in terms of groups and stances membership (Iyengar, Sood, & Lelkes, 2012). Influenced by algorithms that stimulate selective exposure and reinforce their beliefs primarily through what is known as echo chamber effect, social media users tend to easily hold extreme stances, which are ideologically opposed to each other, and refuse to hear from people with other stances (Geiger, 2016, Lee et al., 2018, Narayanan et al., 2018).

In the polarized era, organizational publics are empowered by social media, which determines crises be frequently social-mediated, or, at least, discussed on social media. As the nature of social-mediated crises is dynamic and regenerative, organizations are required to switch their response strategies to address the shifting crisis situations (Coombs, 2017). Individual stakeholders that are active online, in fact, are not only involved in relationships with organizations, but they also find themselves in public-public networks (Mak & Ao, 2019). As a result, stakeholders’ opinions shared and interacted online are increasingly a component of the crisis environment that must be considered by organizations. Therefore, the use of contingency theory to address the dynamic crisis nature requires that some contingent variables – e.g., those related to external publics and social contexts – are refined to highlight the crisis cycle nature on social media.

Past crisis communication studies investigated the effects of advocacy and accommodation as predominant crisis response strategies (Coombs and Holladay, 2007, Jin et al., 2006), yet not many studies have exceeded a strategic focus on pure advocacy or accommodation (Jin, Pang, & Cameron, 2011). With the rise of social media centrality and the activism of online publics, the use of avoidance (i.e., refraining from responding to aggressive comments) or diversion has been increasingly adopted by PR practitioners with the aim of safeguarding the relations between organizations and their publics (Cheng, 2016, Dignath et al., 2015, Huang et al., 2005).