Abstract: In the social media environment, guiding and governing public opinions on a corporate crisis event has become more and more challenging. A key to managing corporate crisis is to find out how public opinions on an event spread. Based on 42 cases of corporate crisis event spreading through public opinions, this paper uses the multi-stage fsQCA method that incorporates life cycle theory to explore the internal mechanism of how a corporate crisis event gets disseminated through public opinions from the information ecological configuration perspective. The results show that:(1) The driving effect of various information ecological elements and their configurations on the dissemination of enterprise crisis public opinion is different at different stages and leads to the same result, and the driving mechanism for the generation of high and non-high dissemination situation is characterized by causal asymmetry. (2) In the formation stage of public opinion, authoritative subjects play a major driving role, which is the key reason for the outbreak of enterprise crisis public opinions. In the spread stage of public opinion, the focus of public opinion transfers from the official public opinion field to the civil public opinion field, and private media groups become the key cause of high dissemination situation of corporate crisis public opinions. In the decline stage of public opinion, official retrospective analysis and the attributes of crisis event itself will keep relevant public opinions lingering. (3) In the stage of opinion formation and spread, there is a phenomenon that the information holder dominates the dissemination of corporate crisis public opinion, but this phenomenon ceases to exist in the stage of decline. The research conclusions of this paper expand the theoretical perspective of corporate crisis public opinion dissemination mechanism, and provide theoretical and practical enlightenment for managers to guide and govern relevant public opinions.

Key words: corporate crisis events, network public opinion, information ecology, life cycle, multi-stage QCA