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Introduction
This article aims to explore and develop the roles and practices of communication professionals in internal crisis communication. In recent decades, crisis management and crisis communication research have developed into strong research fields, but so far the internal aspect has remarkably been neglected. An internal crisis communication perspective focuses on the need for information, communication and sense-making among managers and employees during the acute phase of a crisis, and also on the intrinsic role of communication in crisis preparedness, anticipation and learning within an organisation (cf. [62] Weick and Sutcliffe, 2007). We now see an increasing interest in internal communication among scholars (e.g. [24] Gilpin and Murphy, 2008; [37] Mazzei, 2010; [56] Taylor, 2010; [22] Frandsen and Johansen, 2011; [28] Johansen et al. , 2012; [39] Mazzei et al. , 2012), but there is a great need for more research in order to develop the field of crisis communication further ([56] Taylor, 2010). One aspect of crisis communication that is neglected is the role and practices of communication professionals. There has been extensive focus in the literature on crisis managers and their ambitions to handle and solve crises (see [10] Coombs et al. , 2010; [23] Gilpin and Murphy, 2010), but we need additional knowledge about the specific role and practices of communication managers and other communication professionals. Several researchers (e.g. [15] Falkheimer and Heide, 2006; [46] Reber and Berger, 2006; [4] Bowen, 2009; [16] Falkheimer and Heide, 2010) have stressed that crisis management is a field where the communication profession can show its main value and influence critical processes. One distinct example was given during the tsunami catastrophe in Southeast Asia in 2004. With 20,000 Swedish tourists in Thailand, the communication manager of one of the biggest travel agencies in Sweden achieved status as a national heroine in just a few days. Thus, provided that the communicators do their job well, a crisis can actually enhance the value and status of their profession. At the same time, public relations or communication management is often conceived as being equivalent to media management and information dissemination after a crisis has occurred ([44] Pearson and Mitroff, 1993; [35] Littlefield et al. , 2010), which tends to reduce the communication profession to something reactive and tactical....