Crisis Communication Regarding Terrorist Attacks - Westminster 2017 : Example or Counterexample of Effective Discursive Strategies ?

Details

Supervisors

De Cock, Sylvie ; Liegeois, Michel

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en communication multilingue

Abstract

Nowadays, all types of organizations can find themselves in the middle of a crisis that could harm their reputation and force them to react through corrective actions and communication efforts, the latter being the most important factor to ensure crisis management success. Among the possibilities of crises, a worldwide phenomenon has raised many questions regarding crisis communication in the last two decades, i.e. terrorist attacks. As terrorist attacks often threatens the lives of private citizens, the organizations that are more likely to be pointed at regarding responsibility for the crisis are the public authorities. Public safety is one of their legitimate tasks, and consequently, terrorist attacks are likely to harm public authorities’ reputation, i.e. their social legitimacy in the eyes of citizens. Facing these attacks, public authorities will have to use discursive strategies to maintain or improve their reputation, and keep support for the values they defend and the decisions that will be made based on those values. Although the field of crisis communication has been studied for a long time, the particularities of terrorism, and the recent evolutions of this phenomenon, as well as the specificity of public authorities as ‘organizations in crisis’, call for a perpetual scientific questioning to understand how public authorities can face the reputational challenges posed by terrorism. Accordingly, the main objective of this thesis is to understand how public authorities can prevent any harm to their prior reputation through discursive strategies when facing terrorist attacks. To reach this goal, a case study was conducted regarding the discursive strategies that were used by the British Public Authorities during the Westminster Attack in 2017. Two research questions helped determining which discursive strategies were used, based on the public authorities’ prior reputation, and whether these response strategies were supported by the citizens and enabled British Public Authorities to prevent harm to their reputation. The obtained results enabled this case study to become an example of discursive strategies that prevent terrorist attacks from causing reputational damage to public authorities’ reputation.