From Authoritative Pronouncement to Dialogic Repair: Digital Leadership and Public Resonance in Corporate Crisis Communication

Abstract

Digital platform has fundamentally changed enterprise crisis communication and changed crisis interpretation from organizational control to continuous public negotiation. Though the existing researches have extensively investigated crisis coping strategies and digital leadership, relatively little attention has been paid to how business leaders modify organizational discourse to cope with the ever-changing public interpretation. In order to solve this gap, this study investigates how digital leadership makes the organization change from authoritative statement to dialogue repair during the enterprise crisis. Using a retrospective multi-case design, this study compares three high-profile corporate crises, involving United Airlines, Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal, and Starbucks' Philadelphia incident. The analysis is based on a selected online corpus of 42 public texts related to the event, including company statements, executive communications, media reports, regulatory documents and public discourse. By comparative qualitative analysis, this study found a common process of connecting closed authoritative meaning, public anti-frame, discourse dislocation, dialogue repair and differentiated public resonance. The results show that the initial response of enterprises often fails, not because of insufficient information, but because the definition of crisis is different from that of the affected public. Only when organizations recognize the legitimacy of public experience, expand the responsibility from individuals to organizational systems, and institutionalize corrective measures through observable organizational changes will dialogue repair be effective. In this study, three kinds of repair trajectories-forced reversal, gradual responsibility expansion and rapid relationship absorption-are further identified, which have partial, controversial and repair resonance respectively. By conceptualizing digital leadership as a discourse and relational ability, rather than just a technical ability, this study expands the research on digital leadership, crisis communication and organizational legitimacy in the public environment of digital networks.