Managing Communication Campaigns During Crises According To William Thomas’s Social Theory

Starting from the sociological theory of William Thomas which says that when people consider a situation as real, it becomes real through the consequences it produces, in this paper we intend to analyze how that works in the case of specific situations.

We begin with the conceptual delimitations of the main terms we operate with, according to the approaches proposed by the pioneers of the American Interactionism, the promoters of this perspective. Furthermore, we intend to analyze actual cases where this theory applies in specific situations, emphasizing the individual context and the differentiated management of the communication strategy, while tracking the obtained results.

The crisis situations aimed in our study can be integrated into two main categories: those manifested at organizational level and those recorded at country level, with international consequences. Nowadays society, recognized as a knowledge based one, is dominated by abundant information, that can be structured and systematized in such ways that the created scenarios can sometimes irreversible determine the destiny of individuals, organizations or even countries. This are the key elements we want to study in this paper.