The development of pandemic outbreak communication: A literature review from the response enactment perspective

ABSTRACT

In December 2019, the novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV, which has caused the latest public health emergency of international concern, began to spread with exponential speed around the whole world. To further the understanding of how media technologies contribute to knowledge management for a pandemic outbreak communication (POC), this paper, through Key-route main path analysis (MPA), investigates the research literature on POC. This paper found that studies on the main paths mainly focus on public cognition at the beginning and later the attention is transferred to how to fight against the outbreak and thus reveals the changing role of media technologies in knowledge management. To examine the dynamic structure of communication between government and public, this study relies on the “enactment” perspective to shed light on how the government makes sense of the media technologies and the circumstances of the pandemic to further knowledge management in POC. © Operational Research Society 2021.