Ethical Obligations in Risk and Crisis Communication

Abstract: When organizations face times of crisis or need to communicate risk to stakeholders, ethical dilemmas inevitably emerge. Communication must be quick and accurate, but often the attempt to achieve one comes at the expense of the other. Additionally, organizations face obligations of transparency, but to what point? Extensive revelation may at times be as damaging as opacity. The paper discusses the ethical concerns inherent in theories of crisis and risk communication within the context of said practices.