Successfully adapting to organizational changes during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis necessitated the effective deployment of technical communication texts delineating the expectations and structures for guiding behavior and interactions. A dearth of system-wide familiarity with changes in modalities has disrupted expectations and impacted engagement. During acute events, business and technical communicators will probably not be the initial source of transition messaging. Instead, this task will fall on managers, faculty, and other front-line communicators. The authors present pragmatic recommendations for adapting familiar discourses, semiotics, and mental scripts so that communicators can more effectively intervene during crises to ease organizational transitions and decrease uncertainty.

Functional complexity is a widespread and underresearched phenomenon in Web sites. This article explores a specific case of functional complexity by analyzing the content of UNESCO World Heritage Web sites, which have to meet demands from both World Heritage and tourism perspectives. Based on a functional analysis, a content checklist was developed and used to evaluate a sample of 30 World Heritage Web sites. The results show that World Heritage Web sites generally fall short in all content categories. A cluster analysis reveals three types of World Heritage Web sites based on their emphasis on World Heritage content versus tourism content: (a) less well-developed Web sites (no emphasis), (b) Web sites of World Heritage Sites with touristic possibilities (emphasis on World Heritage), and (c) Web sites of touristic attractions with outstanding cultural or natural value (emphasis on tourism). In all, the findings show that functional complexity poses serious threats to the exhaustiveness of a Web site's information and that evaluation approaches based on functional analysis can be useful in detecting blindspots in the content provided.

The marketing success of green products has spawned the phenomenon of greenwashing, but studies on the effects of greenwashing on consumers are still limited. Using a 4 × 2 randomized experimental design, this study examines such effects by determining whether consumers respond differently to greenwashing, silent brown, vocal green, and silent green organizations selling hedonic products (perfume) or utilitarian products (detergent). The results show that consumers recognized the green claims in the greenwashing condition, which led to an environmental performance impression in between green and brown organizations but also to more negative judgments about the integrity of communication. Regarding purchase interest, greenwashing organizations performed similarly as silent brown organizations, with significantly lower scores than those of vocal green and silent green organizations. No significant effects of product type and no interaction effects were found. Overall, greenwashing has only limited benefits (perceived environmental performance), poses a major threat (perceived integrity), and has no true competitive advantage (purchase interest).