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Drawing from communication and crisis management research, we theorize that a crisis generates an evaluative social process in which an organization and its stakeholders deliberate the details of the crisis. We argue that the nature of this process makes it difficult for the organization to minimize its losses while also mobilizing stakeholder support, in contrast to the prescriptions of traditional scholarship. We advance research by exposing this trade-off and by explicating the complexities associated with the crisis communication process. We also consider contingent factors that influence this trade-off, including stakeholders’ attributions of a crisis and trust in the organization.

Transnational governance schemes (TGSs) are interorganizational networks of public and/or private actors that jointly regulate global public policy issues such as the prevention of human rights violations and the protection of ecosystems. Considering that TGSs mInly address issues of public concern the general public represents a major source of legitimacy in transnational governance. We theorize how members of the general public whom we conceptualize as intuiters apply heuristics to bestow legitimacy on TGSs. Given the difficulty of assessing TGSs we argue that intuiters draw on affect based responses towards a TGS's better known network affiliates such as participating business firms to judge the legitimacy of the TGS as a whole. This substitution produces a 'vertical' legitimacy spillover. More specifically we examine the heuristic process of judgment underlying vertical spillovers in TGSs and derive implications for the legitimacy construct and the analysis of spillover phenomena. © 2013 John Wiley Sons Ltd and Society for the Advancement of Management Studies.

This paper focuses on how media coverage influences innovation adoption. Specifically, we examine the effects of news media: (1) attention, (2) tenor (or affective content), (3) diversity of issues and (4) specific content areas on the likelihood and speed of adoption of wind power plants in the US. The theory developed in this paper suggests that news media both affects and reflects the cognitive appraisals of various primary stakeholders as they seek to make sense of the value of a proposed innovation. We add to the nascent infomediaries research literature in four important ways: providing additional empirical evidence for decreasing returns to media attention, examining the effect of specific content areas, providing further empirical evidence of the importance of tenor alone and in interaction with content, and demonstrating the effect of media on a new dependent variable not previously studied in media effects on market outcomes research. This study adds to the innovation literature by highlighting an important non-market actor, the media, on the diffusion of innovations, and to the managerial and organizational cognition literature by suggesting that affective content (emotions) and specific aspects of content (cognition) on the part of third party infomediaries is associated with innovation diffusion.