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Part of
The Language of Crisis: Metaphors, frames and discourses
Edited by Mimi Huang and Lise-Lotte Holmgreen
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 87] 2020
► pp. 87–107

Chapter 3
Responding to organisational misbehaviour

The influence of public frames in social media

Over the past decades, the seriousness with which organisational crises have developed has, in part, been contingent on public access to social media platforms. Analysing two Danish organisational crises, the chapter explores whether the conceptual repertoires that underlie public evaluation of organisational behaviour are embedded in shared social and cultural practices that allow them to be expressed and shared easily and intuitively. The findings suggest that by drawing on well-established experiential domains in social and cultural life, users in public social media may instantiate frames that inspire other users to follow suit. This may create dominant interpretations across platforms and lay the foundation of crisis development.

Keywords: social media, public evaluation, conceptual grounding, crisis, framing, metaphor, case study
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Framing and the relevance of metaphor to public social media action
    • 2.1Metaphor as framing
  • 3.Case studies and data retrieval
    • 3.1Data and their retrieval
  • 4.Framing the steakhouse
    • 4.1Two frames to discredit the steakhouse
  • 5.Framing the bank
    • 5.1One frame to discredit the bank
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 July 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.87.03hol
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