Reverse Communication Cascades and Reputational Adjacency: How Platform-Mediated Business Communication Inverts CEO Sensegiving in Technology Disruption Lessons from DeepSeek R1 Release
TL;DR
The study introduces reputational adjacency to describe a crisis-like condition in which reputational pressure on a firm arises from a competitor’s technological success rather than organisational failure.
Abstract
This study examines how platform-mediated environments reshape the temporal structure of business communication cascades and alter CEO sensegiving authority during technology disruption events. Analysing the DeepSeek R1 episode of January to February 2025, we apply process tracing and directed content analysis to 33 purposively sampled communications from 25 named actors across developer, influencer, market, political, and executive communities. Both coders independently coded all 29 codable events; intercoder reliability was assessed via Cohen’s kappa (acknowledgement κ = .76, reframing κ = .85, defensive minimisation κ = .89, geopolitical κ = .91), ranging from substantial to almost perfect agreement. We identify an eight-phase reverse communication cascade in which developers, elite influencers, and financial markets established interpretive frames before incumbent CEOs responded, inverting the conventional CEO-led sequence assumed in agenda-setting and organisational communication research. The study introduces reputational adjacency to describe a crisis-like condition in which reputational pressure on a firm arises from a competitor’s technological success rather than organisational failure. Findings reveal a consistent acknowledge-reframe dyad as the dominant CEO communication response. These concepts extend business communication and crisis communication theory by specifying how platform logics structurally constrain executive sensegiving in competitive disruption contexts.