Stakeholder perspectives on crisis management provide a useful descriptive framework
to analyse crises and to develop crisis narratives. However, their ‘actionability' for crisis
management, i.e. the possibility to use stakeholder management models in operational
crisis management processes, remains an under-investigated research question. This
article, built on a qualitative case study of successful crisis management in a public
transportation company, discusses the operational value of stakeholder frameworks for
crisis management.We investigate the actions set up by the crisis cell to manage internal
and external stakeholders during the crisis. The successful management of the crisis
involved: (1) good stakeholder diagnostic capabilities to design an appropriate corporate
positioning; (2) an ability to identify and coherently manage emerging and heterogeneous
issues involving stakeSholders, i.e. actors that are concerned with multiple issues of the
crisis; and (3) the capacity to set up a tightly coupled ad hoc organization, articulating
both crisis cell members and various ‘anchorage points', i.e. actors previously involved in
the project. Finally, we discuss the implications and potential value of stakeholder
perspectives for crisis management.