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Knowledge Management Research & Practice
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COVID-19 in Italy and issues in the communication
of politics: bridging the knowledge-behaviour gap
Cecilia Casalegno , Chiara Civera & Damiano Cortese
To cite this article: Cecilia Casalegno , Chiara Civera & Damiano Cortese (2020): COVID-19 in Italy and issues in the communication of politics: bridging the knowledge-behaviour gap, Knowledge Management Research & Practice, DOI: 10.1080/14778238.2020.1860664
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14778238.2020.1860664
Published online: 28 Dec 2020.
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COVID-19 in Italy and issues in the communication of politics: bridging
the knowledge-behaviour gap
Cecilia Casalegnoa, Chiara Civeraa and Damiano Corteseb
aDepartment of Management, University of Turin, Torino, Italy; bDepartment of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Modern Culture,
University of Turin, Torino, Italy
ABSTRACT
Our paper discusses the role of the institutional communication of politics during emergencies. We examine the impacts of that communication on the management of over-communication (excessive, confused and uncertain information and knowledge) and under-communication (deficiencies in information and knowledge) to reduce potential knowledge-behaviour gaps (KBGs) in the audience. By outlining some of the controversies and overloads within such communication in Italy during the COVID-19 emergency, we underline a situation of entropy that has increased the KGB among audiences at multiple levels. We also highlight the emer-gence of three patterns that could potentially mitigate the KGB and re-establish coherent and balanced communication to manage emergencies: time, power, and reactions based on relationships. We argue that communication should (1) respect synchronicity, (2) take into account the power of the audience and create a segmented form of knowledge and (3) be based on interaction, participation, and relational-based messages that will favour coherent reactions. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 14 May 2020 Accepted 22 November 2020 KEYWORDS Communication; COVID-19; institutional communication of politics; under- communication; over- communication; knowledge- behaviour gap 1. Introduction
Researchers in the management and communication literature have argued that inefficiencies in communi-cation, especially in emergency and crisis situations, can cause and intensify the knowledge-behaviour gap (KBG) among audiences, which can then lead to mis-behaviours (Invernizzi & Gambetti, 2012; Ropeik & Slovic, 2003; Shaw et al., 2016; Coombs, 2006). Knowledge Management scholars agree that the estab-lishment of a trustful, transparent, and shared com-munication might be key to reduce the KBG and favour coherent behaviours and reactions among the audience (Albu & Flyverbom, 2019; Calton & Payne,
2003; Menon & Goh, 2005; Mihók, 2011; Vaccaro & Sison, 2011). However, effective, coordinated and balanced ways of communicating are also widely acknowledged as being difficult to achieve, especially during diseases outbreaks (Bdeir et al., 2013). Sometimes organisations fall into the common trap of communicating less than what is strategically viable or, more frequently, spreading too much and over-lapping information that the audience will be unwill-ing or incapable of understandunwill-ing (Casalegno & Civera, 2016; Sen & Bhattacharya, 2001; Shaw & Clarke, 1999).
Our paper discusses the role of institutional com-munication of politics in supporting the current COVID-19 emergency and the upcoming crisis and related challenges that organisations will necessarily
soon face. Based on the contents and timing of the various institutional communications of politics broadcast throughout Italy during the health emer-gency of COVID-19 – which we have longitudinally analysed from January to April 2020 – we aim to outline the perils of deficiencies in information and knowledge (henceforth under-communication) as well as excessive, confused and uncertain information and knowledge, or over-communication, also known as an
infodemic (Cinelli et al., 2020; Zarocostas, 2020). In doing so, we will attempt to enrich the concepts of over- and under-communication. Furthermore, we will try to aid in the rebalancing of the KBG in times of emergency by discussing the key role of three main patterns that have emerged from some of the current institutional communications shortcomings: time,
power and reactions based on relationships.
On January 31 2020, the Italian government declared a state of emergency, citing sanitary concerns through-out Italy. The government acted after acknowledging the emergence and spread of various clusters of the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) within China since December 31 2020 and later recognising two cases of COVID-19 in Rome. On 19 February, the Champions League match between Atalanta and Valencia took place at Milan’s San Siro stadium. Afterwards, health officials regarded this match as among the major causes of the spread of COVID-19 in the city of Bergamo, in northern Italy’s Lombardy region, where most of the supporters were from. After
CONTACT Chiara Civera chiara.civera@unito.it University of Turin, Torino, Vicolo Bodoni 4, None (Turin), 10060, Italy https://doi.org/10.1080/14778238.2020.1860664
a few days, a major cluster of COVID-19 also emerged in Codogno, another city in Lombardy; on February 21 2020, the mayor of Codogno announced the first lock-down in Italy. This was only the first of a series of lockdowns in the Lombardy region that happened in the following days, including in Casalpusterlengo, Lodi and Bergamo.
The gravity of the situation became clearer, and the number of people infected with COVID-19 kept rising exponentially throughout Italy, with 528 people (305 in Lombardy alone) infected and 14 dead by February 27 2020, according to official data from the Italian health department. The leader of Italy’s Democratic Party posted a picture on Instagram invit-ing his followers to stick to their routines and to not stop their activities in Milan or Italy, stating: “Usciamo a bere un aperitivo, un caffè o per mangiare una pizza” [“Let’s go out for happy hour, to drink coffee or eat pizza”]. The next day, Confindustria (the Italian Enterprises Association) of Bergamo seemed to follow the same approach and published an institutional advertisement through a video on its webpage claim-ing that “on our territory the risk is low. . . . We would like to confirm that our companies’ operations are not affected . . . ” The aim was to reassure its partners that “#bergamoisrunning” (Bergamo is running).
Due to the growing rate of infected people by 8 March, with 7,375 Italians now infected, the prime minister gave an official speech on the night of 8 March announcing further measures to contain the spread of the virus. The next day, the PM officially signed a ministerial decree that locked down Italy entirely, forcing Italians to stay at home until 3 April, effective immediately from 10 March. Through the creation of a FAQ page accompanied by the social spreading of the hashtag #ImStayingHome (Io Resto a Casa, or “I’m staying home”), the Italian government attempted to explain the main aim of the ministerial decree and the contents and implications of the restrictions.
Meanwhile, CNN and local Italian media had spread rumours about a possible official lockdown, which caused thousands of people to disobey the recommendations and the decree and crowd trains in the following days to return to their hometowns, thus increasing the risk of infection (Cinelli et al.,
2020). Despite the PM’s reassurances in his official speech (streamed live on his Facebook page and broadcast on all the main national television channels) that the lockdown and the restrictions would not affect grocery shopping from that moment on, and that supermarkets would be regularly opened and supplied, people started to assault the supermarkets. Directly following the PM’s speech, shoppers created long and risky queues and left the shelves almost empty, thus exasperating unjustified behaviour that had already been common over the previous weeks.
This is just a small picture of Italy’s health and information issue, accompanied by controversies and an overload in the institutional communication of politics, that caused this entropy to increase a knowledge-behaviour gap (henceforth KBG) in audiences at multiple levels. The situation prompts the question: What went wrong, and what could be rethought and adjusted from the communication side?
We will answer this question by employing a longitudinal methodological approach that is based on the daily content analysis – from the 31st of January to the 30th of April – of the communication messages spread by national and regional political institutions as well as national and regional category associations. We have included in the investigation all communications spread both on official channels such as official ministerial, regional and associations web-sites and official pages on social media platforms and unofficial channels such as politicians’ personal profile pages on social media platforms. Our analysis included official speeches, original documents such as Ministerial Decrees and regional regulations, official communications about industries’ roles and regula-tions during COVID-19 as well as declararegula-tions and opinions spread by politicians on their personal profile pages on social media platforms.
2. The knowledge-behaviour gap and the role of communication
The KGB refers to a situation of incoherency and inconsistency between what people know or might know (based on the information at their disposal), or the information they might have access to or under-stand, and how they act on that knowledge (Rimal,
2000; Sligo & Jameson, 2000). Several researchers on health and emergency issues (Granatt, 2004; Menon & Goh, 2005) have approached this gap and its implica-tions, as have researchers who have examined consu-mers’ ethical and sustainable purchasing choices and social researchers in general (Carrington et al., 2014; Grimmelikhuijsen, 2012; Sen & Bhattacharya, 2001; Shaw et al., 2016). From different perspectives, these works have explained that attitudes and intentions (generally thought to be predictive of audiences’ beha-viours) are the results of both the characteristics of information and the way that audiences receive and process that information (Papaoikonomou et al.,
2011).
We acknowledge that both exogenous and endo-genous elements can stretch or close the KBG. Our focus in this paper is on communication – which is instrumental to making information available to audi-ences (Grunig, 2001) – as an exogenous driver to stimulating trust and enacting coherent behaviours in audiences. We will leave for future research the crucial analysis of individuals’ characteristics, such as
cultural and social backgrounds, prejudgements, values, preferences, moral attitudes, and the construc-tion of social percepconstruc-tion (Cinelli et al., 2020; Ingram et al., 2005; Michailova & Sidorova, 2011; Schmidt et al., 2017).
Communication appears to be crucial during crisis times (Invernizzi & Gambetti, 2012; Ropeik & Slovic,
2003; Coombs, 2006). The literature that has devel-oped around the communication of risk during crises and infectious outbreaks, such as that of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003, is vast. Scholars and professionals alike have agreed that some com-munication principles serve as starting points to effec-tively manage crises and to create the necessary trust for the audience to behave and react coherently in order to communicate messages that address the key information about the issue (Menon & Goh, 2005). Effective communication during crises is widely acknowledged to entail a variety of factors, as follows:
(1) the provision of “specific harm-reducing information to affected communities in an honest, candid, prompt, accurate, and com-plete manner” (Reynolds & W. Seeger, 2005, p. 46) and messages that are simple and quick (Freberg et al., 2013);
(2) the presentation of clear objectives and goals (Du et al., 2010);
(3) the provision of proofs of tangible actions, as well as coherency between actions and words (Granatt, 2004);
(4) equilibrium between promises of communica-tion and shared performances (Hur et al., 2014); (5) coherency among messages spread by different
authoritative or institutional organisations (Menon & Goh, 2005); among the most impor-tant premises to communication coherency in this sense is the creation of a cooperative and interactive stakeholder network, where key individuals act as “convenors” of multi- perspective conversations and converge those conversations into a shared communication (Calton & Payne, 2003; Mihók, 2011);
(6) the following of an agenda and correct timing (Granatt, 2004);
(7) coherency among communication channels and media (both traditional and social) (Casalegno & Civera, 2016);
(8) the dispensation of symmetric information, even if doing so is hard to achieve (Morsing & Schultz, 2006; Shaw et al., 2016), meaning that the message should be adapted to the reference audience, which can be divided in this context into opinion-leader audiences (e.g., experts, journalists and scientists) and the general public (Dawkins, 2005);
(9) adaptation of the message to the communica-tion channel and media (both tradicommunica-tional and social) that best fit both professional and non- professional stakeholders (Axjonow et al.,
2018);
(10) transparency, intended to provide the back-ground evidence of decisions and actions (Albu & Flyverbom, 2019).
3. Transparency at the intersection between under- and over-communication
Two opposing categories of communication, which are commonly defined as under- and over-communication in the managerial communication literature, contribute to further the KBG (Cinelli et al., 2020; Civera et al., 2018; Shaw et al., 2016). Under-communication means hiding or denying the real intents behind an action and/or message, or avoiding the communication of certain infor-mation out of fear of being judged, misjudged or mis-understood (Civera et al., 2018). In contrast, over- communication generally entails the provision of too much information and sometimes diverging contents (Shaw & Clarke, 1999), which might create confusion and uncertainty (Shaw et al., 2016; Shiu et al., 2011). Over-communication can be also identified as a situation of communication and information overload (Eppler & Mengis, 2004), and the overload and over-lapping of official and unofficial channels and media (Meier, 1963; Stephens et al., 2017). The recently coined term infodemic (Zarocostas, 2020) also describes over- communication during situations of dangerous misinfor-mation in the midst of viral outbreaks that can create fragmented social responses and incoherent reactions that can then help to speed the spread of the infection (Cinelli et al., 2020). The corporate responsibility litera-ture offers several insights to describe this concept, spe-cifically the communication of promises and intents that lack practical implications or can reflect achievements that have not in fact happened and inconsistent messa-ging that is poorly based on data and facts (Hur et al.,
2014; Jahdi & Acikdilli, 2009). Stephens et al. (2017) use a formative model of communication overload to sum-marise the relationships among key patterns that together define such an overload, including compromised mes-sage quality, having too many distractions, depending too much on information and communication technology (ICT), the feeling of responsibility to respond, the pres-sure to make decisions, being overwhelming with infor-mation and the piling up of messages.
Especially during crises (Menon & Goh, 2005; Coombs, 2009), two main factors might exasperate under- and over-communication, thus putting effec-tive communication at further risk. First, because of social media’s rapid increase and overuse of a variety of ICTs, the analytical framework of communication
appears more unstable, complex, and interconnected (Bayer et al., 2016). The fact that multiple audiences at multiple levels can receive a larger amount of informa-tion simultaneously and then spread the same infor-mation, sometimes mixing reliable and non-reliable sources, puts the veracity and certainty of information at risk. This broadcasting has clear issues and chal-lenges for communication and its expected outcomes on knowledge and behaviour (Burchell, 2015; Freberg et al., 2013). During the COVID-19 emergency, this confusion has been aggravated “by a plethora of media reports with diverse perspectives and advice” (Reeves et al., 2020) and by the fact that we are witnessing an even stronger “dynamic transparency”, which is linked to the role of ICT in potentially enhancing the colla-boration and the two-way exchange of information between stakeholders (Vaccaro & Madsen, 2009).
This situation relates to the second issue: that of transparency. Under normal circumstances, transpar-ent communication arguably leads to a certain level of trust (Albu & Flyverbom, 2019) if it is mediated by knowledgeable groups who report real facts and fully disclose “all relevant information in a timely manner” (Berglund, 2014, p. 362). But transparency is a controversial, “volatile and imprecise” (Williams,
2005, p. 359) concept per se that is sometimes misused even by practitioners and academics (Vaccaro & Sison,
2011). Transparency is also paradoxical by nature (Albu & Flyverbom, 2019) and is difficult to generalise and standardise. Sometimes organisations might con-fuse transparency with a full eradication of barriers between themselves and the audience, who might not be ready to process certain information. We need to consider that transparency is strongly dependent upon the contextual conditions that the information refers to: there is a thin line between creating fear and bad behaviours and creating trust through transparency (Albu & Flyverbom, 2019). This complication has led scholars to admit that sometimes too much transpar-ency can also be counterproductive and create hetero-genetic outcomes, especially during crises (De Cremer,
2016). During the current virus outbreak, for example, the issue of transparency has been involved in a major asymmetry of power and information between appar-ently more knowledgeable or opinion-leader audi-ences and the general public. Information is also confusing and based on technical knowledge because the topic is new and data can be hard to interpret (Newton, 2020). Providing specific and tailored goals thus becomes difficult, and respecting the timely man-ner in which people perceive communication as trans-parent is certainly harder to do. Indeed, when authorities are involved in making decisions “concern-ing health and environmental risks sometimes [they] find themselves facing a situation in which available scientific data are contradictory or quantitatively scarce . . .. The circumstances of uncertainty and
provisional solutions make it particularly important that the decision-making process be transparent” (CST, 2004).
As Tarki et al. (2020) have noted, “Everyone knows that we are going through a global pandemic. Everyone knows certain sectors of the economy are already get-ting hit hard by changes in consumer behaviour as a result of this virus. And everyone knows a slowdown in parts of the economy and increased uncertainty might impact their company as well”. But when does transparency risk being perceived as over-transparency and therefore lead to over-communication and misin-formation? “Information transparency . . . can be impaired if false details (misinformation) or inadequate or excessive amounts of information are disclosed” (Turilli & Floridi, 2009, p. 107).
Given these premises, we suggest a rethinking of the under- and over-communication paradigm in light of patterns that have emerged from the current com-munication shortcomings. We will outline this rethinking in the next section. While we acknowledge that effective communication is hard to achieve during emergencies such as that of COVID-19, we also argue that including these patterns in the conceptualisation of under- and over-communication is key to moderat-ing the effects of such inevitable situations of commu-nication, especially during emergencies. Addressing these patterns can potentially bridge certain KBGs that can lead to misbehaviours.
4. The institutional communications of politics during COVID-19
Based on an early analysis of some of the institutional communications of politics in Italy, which clearly caused misinterpretations and misbehaviours among the general public and opinion-leader stakeholders alike, we will outline three patterns of communication that, by being overlooked, have contributed to stres-sing situations of over- and under-communication and the relating KBG: timing, power, and reactions based on relationships.
The issue of timing appears crucial in the current institutional communication of politics. We have detected two main shortcomings in the management of communication timing that have contributed to enlarging the gap between expected knowledge and linked behaviours. First, a clear situation of asynchro-nous communication between the institutional mes-sage and the opinion-leader audience (in this case the press) emerged at the very beginning of the Italian lockdown. On March 7 2020, CNN published an arti-cle on its website reporting a draft proposal of the ministerial decree noted earlier before it was even approved and signed and its content communicated to the general public in Italy. According to the article, some of the most afflicted provinces of northern Italy
would be locked down shortly: “The text of the draft proposal – also sent to CNN by the press office of the Lombardy regional authority – says that people in Lombardy and the other 11 provinces [of northern Italy] should ‘absolutely avoid any movement into and out . . . as well as within the same territories . . . except for travel motivated by unavoidable working needs or situations of emergency’” (cnn.com). This kind of asynchrony and leaking of information can be thought of as over-communication that people perceive as being unnecessary and redundant. As mentioned earlier, this over-communication caused thousands of people (including workers and students) from the most affected northern regions to run to train stations and jump on the first trains to return to their hometowns in the centre or south of Italy, thus increasing the potential spread of the infection throughout the county.
Second, the PM’s official speeches, which were often broadcast indistinctly on national TV channels or the PM’s official Facebook page, consisted of antici-patory content and rules that had not yet been fully finalised and signed or effectively incorporated into a ministerial decree (or updates on a decree). Such a timing gap between communication and effective decisions can be considered evidence of simultaneous over- and under-communication, as the following example shows. On March 21 2020 at 11:20 p.m., the PM delivered his official speech to clarify the content of the ministerial decree that would address the lock-down of non-essential and non-strategic manufactur-ing activities, effective immediately from March 23 2020. During the 20 hours that followed before the decree was officially signed, the doubts and concerns the trade associations (the object of the decree) raised about the essentiality and strategic content of their own core businesses caused Minister of Economic Development Stefano Patuanelli to revise some of the main contents of the decree and to add 80 exceptions to be considered as essential and strategic, in addition to the already-identified businesses. This overload of information (the initial communication and further clarifications), combined with the immediate lack of key information, including official documents at the audience’s disposal (such as trade groups asking whether or not they were eligible to work), represented a risk to the certainty, clarity, and transparency of messages. This uncertainty contributed to an entropic form of knowledge that left many entrepreneurs and other professionals with open questions and even bewilderment.
Such evidence is connected to the second pattern that we have identified in certain communication short-comings: the fact that the conveyers of some key mes-sages have seemed to ignore the level of power among the audience and to spread a non-segmented informa-tion, thus generating knowledge-based confusion and
misbehaviours. By non-segmented information, we refer to information that combines both technical- based knowledge and general knowledge without seg-menting the audience and diversifying the content of the message or the way the message is delivered. This aspect is also related to the issue of over-transparency, with a full eradication of barriers between the commu-nicator and the audience. In the example above, for instance, the communication was clearly structured to develop technical-based knowledge (such as legal mat-ters and economic and financial aspects) about manu-facturing activities.
Such a technical-based content during crisis times typically requires professional interpretation and experts’ translation (Dorasamy et al., 2017) in order to increase the awareness of the situation. When the general public misses certain power categories that would allow them to correctly interpret messages, it is important that an expert intermediary with an opi-nion leader power (which also includes journalists in this case) favours common and shared understanding, avoiding free interpretation of messages (Turoff et al.,
2004). On March 11 2020, the PM officially announced further restrictive measures to the nation’s lockdown of commercial activities: “Italian citizens’ health is and will be the priority. . . . Now it is time to take a step forward. . . . We [have also regulated] the lockdown of all commercial activities . . . except for grocery shops, basic-need items, pharmacies, drugstores. . . . It is not necessary to run to the supermarkets to buy food. . . . We need to limit mobility only to job-related activities, health issues and basic needs such as grocery shop-ping” (Prime minister’s official speech, 2020).
Despite the necessary specification, people started to assault supermarkets on the same night, as noted above, in the process creating long and potentially dangerous queues. Such misbehaviour could be par-tially attributable to an over-communication that, by outlining the urgency of strong restrictive measures, might have given the impression that the lockdown of most commercial activities would also at some point affect regular daily grocery shopping. If the possibility of predicting certain misbehaviours exists, then explaining in a preventive way the long-term intent and impact of actions through communication (and the misbehaviours that the communication could lead to) could make the communication more strategically tailored to different segments of the audience, based on potential behaviours. Such a strategy could be thought of as an action of empowerment that, by clarifying potential behaviours and misbehaviours, could reduce the risk of communication being mis-perceived. The further communications by the PM and other political stakeholders in which they reiter-ated the message of “not running to and not over-crowding the supermarkets”, thus reassuring the audience that supermarkets would never be shut, are
a sign that tailored basic information, separated from technical-based facts, is a highly recommended action of empowerment during emergency times.
Strongly linked to the issue of power, the third pattern we have identified in certain institutional com-munications of politics is related to the contradictory reactions they created in those political stakeholders who play the role of intermediaries, such as local governors and council members in this case. These intermediaries often created confusing communica-tions with trade-off content (Newton, 2020). In response to the PM’s speech of 21 March, in which he announced the further lockdown of manufacturing activities that would be officially finalised and listed in the ministerial decree signed the next day (22 March), the Lombardy governor declared that “talking to all citizens in Lombardy, I am telling them to consider valid and effective the Decree that I personally signed and validated in our Region. In such a Decree, con-tents are certain and clear, regarding both the regula-tions and the timing of their application” (regioni.it, 2020). Leaving aside the fact that, legally, Italian regions have a certain degree of autonomy in certain administrative choices and rules for application, the two contrasting regulations overlapped and were sup-ported by the communications of two authorities with a great deal of power at the same time. This situation created an overabundance of knowledge, the result of over-communication that might have risked the cer-tainty and understanding of messages, especially in an emergency situation such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
Similarly, on March 31 2020, a circular of the ministry of the interior was signed and broadcast to clarify accepted behaviours within the highly debated topic of individual mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the circular, “As far as individuals’ mobility is concerned, we allow one parent only to walk with their minor children, because such an activity can be intended as an open-air physical activity near their own homes [which was allowed, per the March 9 2020 ministerial decree]. Furthermore, the same activity can be conducted for reasons related to health or basic needs” (interno.gov.it, 2020). The reaction of a Lombardy Welfare Council member went in the opposite direction; his official communication con-tained a contrasting view from the ministry of the interior’s words: “The Circular of the Ministry of the Interior risks creating a devastating psychological effect, jeopardising the efforts and sacrifices that we have made so far about the coronavirus. . . . The indication for everybody is to stay at home, at least for several weeks. Only in this way will we be able to fight this deceitful and invisible enemy” (lombardia-notizie.online, 2020). Various local governors pro-vided the same recommendations, which contrasted with the ministry of the interior’s circular.
These statements may be considered under- communication that resulted from contradictory reactions, because the local authorities criticised the institutional communication of politics without pro-viding the audience with a common rule of behaviour or creating a commonly accepted form of knowledge (Turoff et al., 2004). These actions contributed to leaving people with doubts about whether or not they could go out with children (and what the con-sequences would be in their own regions) and created the precedent for the free interpretation of commu-nication. Drawing on Calton and Payne’s (2003) argument that ‘messy’ problems join stakeholders in a network of both shared and conflicting interests, as in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, this joining does not necessarily create negative consequences in communication, actions, and perceptions. On the contrary, in managing messy problems, political sta-keholders can learn how to participate, cooperate, and learn interactively to establish a relational and creative dialogue that, in our case, can lead to better coherency in communication. By considering Calton and Payne’s (2003) model, we argue that, from the communication side, there should be a manager of stakeholder networks who, instead of imposing con-trol on communications, tries to “act as the ‘conve-nor’ of a stakeholder network, exercising a capability to ‘evoke, hold, and embody’” conversations (Isaacs,
1999, p. 238) that can then result in the creation of common knowledge (Mihók, 2011).
5. Conclusions
In detecting situations of over- and under-communi-cations within the current institutional communica-tion of politics, we have outlined that, during the COVID-19 emergency, three main patterns have emerged. These patterns have led to increased ineffi-ciencies of over- and under-communications in terms of audience misbehaviours caused by an expansion of their knowledge-behaviour gap, or KGB. We argue that, by correctly integrating the three patterns into the over- and under-communication paradigm during emergency situations, the inefficiencies of over- and under-communications can be mitigated and the KBG realigned.
We suggest that the proper integration of the three patterns consists of (1) developing synchronous com-munication (the timing aspect), confirming Granatt’s (2004) view that communications should follow a precise agenda and Newton’s (2020) argument that when this condition is not satisfied, confusion is created among the audience as a result of over- communication inefficiencies (Casalegno & Civera,
2016); (2) empowering the audience by segmenting the information and creating a tailored type of knowledge (through the support of opinion-leader
audiences such as the press or more knowledgeable stakeholders about the topic) that can then be used to more effectively interpret and translate technical- based knowledge (the power aspect), by applying the arguments supported by Dorasamy et al. (2017) Turoff et al. (2004); and (3) creating a stakeholder network that can develop dialogic relationships and integrate the institutional points of view into a common communication that leaves few spaces for free interpretation (the relationship-based
reac-tion aspect) and, therefore, results in the creareac-tion of
common knowledge (Mihók, 2011). Figure 1 shows a graphical representation of our argument.
Some concluding remarks are necessary to illus-trate the limits of our research and to foster further dialogue on the topic. First, we do not propose that over- and under-communication alone can lead to an expansion of the KBG or that communication alone is conducive to misbehaviours. As we specified at the beginning of this paper, we have left aside all key considerations about individuals’ characteris-tics, beliefs, and backgrounds that shape their
perceptions, attitudes, and behaviours (Michailova & Sidorova, 2011; Papaoikonomou et al., 2011). That said, we can argue that both opinion-leader audi-ences and general audiaudi-ences can avoid misbeha-viours even if they have been targets of over- or under-communications because of personal atti-tudes that might exert even more impact during emergency times. We have not discussed this possi-bility in this work. The same applies in the other direction: personal characteristics might be condu-cive of misbehaviours even if the communication is effective. Conducting an analysis of which of the audience’s individual characteristics shape their attitudes and behaviours could thus open useful avenues for future research. Second, we must note that the three patterns we have identified within institutional over- and under-communications of politics fit best within the current COVID-19 emer-gency, and it is during emergency situations that we argue these patterns should be correctly integrated into the under- and over-communication paradigm. Whether the correct implementation of timing,
Figure 1. Patterns for mitigating over- and under-communications effects during emergencies. Source: Authors’ elaboration
power and reactions based on relationships in over- and under-communications will be valid for poten-tially mitigating the KBG in regular contexts is a question to be explored in future work.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
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