Crisis Typologies Revisited: An Interdisciplinary Approach

For effective crisis management and communication, a decision maker has to understand the causes and nature of a crisis and how it influences stakeholder perceptions. Identifying an organization's vulnerabilities is essential for crisis prevention but practitioners often lack the ability to define crisis scenarios, especially the worst-case ones. A crisis typology is a structured approach to analyze crisis situations and to introduce measures for crisis prevention and containment. This paper aims to review recent literature on crisis classifications and to discuss their application. Because a single typology cannot capture the complexity and the interdisciplinary nature of a crisis, four relevant typologies from different disciplines are compared. Their combined application in an interdisciplinary framework is suggested. The paper discusses the need for typologies that reflect the cultural and contextual dimensions. Conclusions concerning the limitations and directions for further research are drawn.