Who can speak in a crisis?Terseglav, Saša (Avtor) Lamut, Urša (Avtor) Kropivnik, Samo (Avtor) Bourdieuinstitutional fragmentationlegitimacy misalignmentCrisis communication in public health systems is constrained not only by the availability of communication models, but also bythe dispersion of legitimacy across multiple actors. While existing literature often assumes a coherent organisational actorcapable of unified strategic action, this article shows that in institutionally fragmented systems, formal authority, expertlegitimacy and public credibility may be distributed across different actors. Drawing on Bourdieu's theory of social fields, thestudy introduces the concept of legitimacy misalignment to analyse how power relations and distributed sources of legitimacyshape crisis communication in the Slovenian public health system. The study combines contextual survey data with qualitativematerial from three focus groups and six in‐depth interviews (N = 29). The findings show that institutional fragmentation,hierarchical filtering and the misalignment between formal authority, expert legitimacy and public credibility constraincoherent communication. The article contributes to crisis communication research by demonstrating how legitimacy mis-alignment limits the practical feasibility of organisation‐centred models in multi‐actor public health contexts. It shifts analyticalattention from strategy selection to the structural conditions of communicative action.20262026-07-06 14:13:49Članek v reviji184405UDK: 316.77:004.774.1(497.4)ISSN pri članku: 0966-0879DOI: 10.1111/1468-5973.70181Digital Object Identifier (DOI)COBISS_ID: 283014659slSlovenija;