From stakeholder to stake sholder management in crisis episodes. A case study in a public transportation company.

Stakeholder perspectives on crisis management provide a useful descriptive framework to analyse crises and to develop crisis narratives. However, their ‘actionability’ for crisismanagement, i.e. the possibility to use stakeholder management models in operationalcrisis management processes, remains an under-investigated research question. Thisarticle, built on a qualitative case study of successful crisis management in a publictransportation company, discusses the operational value of stakeholder frameworks forcrisis management.We investigate the actions set up by the crisis cell to manage internaland external stakeholders during the crisis. The successful management of the crisisinvolved: (1) good stakeholder diagnostic capabilities to design an appropriate corporatepositioning; (2) an ability to identify and coherently manage emerging and heterogeneousissues involving stakeSholders, i.e. actors that are concerned with multiple issues of thecrisis; and (3) the capacity to set up a tightly coupled ad hoc organization, articulatingboth crisis cell members and various ‘anchorage points’, i.e. actors previously involved inthe project. Finally, we discuss the implications and potential value of stakeholderperspectives for crisis management.