Corporate Communications Crisis Leadership: Advocacy and Ethics addresses the interplay of strategic moments of corporate communication clarity and/or its lack. This work differentiates issue, argument, conflict, and crisis while explicating their related interaction in organizational success or failure. Strategic communication responsiveness attends to a breadth of stakeholder concerns, interests, and demands, recognizing the communication ethics implications of such action. We explicate the performative consequences as British Petroleum in 2010 in the oil spill off the southern coast of the United States repeatedly failed to attend to information that could overt the Deepwater Horizon crisis. The organic connections between and among issue, argument, conflict, and crisis announce the existence or absence of communication ethics in action, which, this work contends, is essential for long-term leadership within a given industry.
Keywords
argument, British Petroleum, clarity, conflict, corporate communication, crisis, Deepwater Horizon, definition, discernment, external constituencies, internal constituencies, issue