The Impact of Contextual Factors on Social Mediated Crisis. Revisiting the concept of ‘modifier’ in situational crisis communication theory

This study examines the impact of contextual factors on social mediated crisis by revisiting the concept of “modifier” in situational crisis communication theory (SCCT). Existing studies on “modifiers” in SCCT largely limit their scopes within the organizational domain and overlook the impact of contextual factors beyond organization, such as society, politics, and culture. To advance the understanding of the impact of contextual factors on crisis, the study conducts an inductive framing analysis to scrutinize the top 100 forwarded tweets about a homicide case occurred at a McDonald's in weibo, the Chinese microblogging service. It identifies a repertory of five frames and nine sub-frames that are contextually embedded. The findings demonstrate that social media allow multiple crisis communicators to engage in crisis communication at different stages by distributing diverse, competing crisis frames. These frames entail corresponding contextual factors, which constrain or facilitate the reality construction in a crisis. The power dimensions among these frames are in a state of flux, which constantly influences crisis attributions. This study concludes that the contextual factors beyond the organization shape crisis communication by transforming the attributions generated by crisis types.