Can and shall an organization that finds itself in a crisis situation communicate with its
internal stakeholders in the same way it communicates with its external stakeholders?
And if the answer is no, what then distinguishes internal crisis communication from
external crisis communication? These are the two questions that we would like to
address in this conceptual paper.
Over the last ten to 15 years, crisis communication has established itself as a new
academic discipline cherishing ambitions to become an autonomous research area of its
own. Initiatives have been taken to organize topic-specific international conferences on
crisis communication (such as the new series of conferences about Crisis
Communication at the Beginning of the 21st Century, which started in October 2009
at Ilmenau University of Technology in Germany). Initiatives have also been taken to
create new topic-specific international research networks (such as the new ECREA
Temporary Working Group on Crisis Communication established in 2011). Or as the
two editors of the newly published and voluminous Handbook of Crisis
Communication, Coombs and Holladay (2010, p. xxvi), rightly state