Corporate reputation in management research: a review of the literature and assessment of the concept (original) (raw)
Related papers
Challenges in Measuring Corporate Reputation
Reputation Management, 2011
Corporate reputation is a driver of economic performance. Thus, the measurement of corporate reputation becomes an important field for academic research and the development of reputation management applications (Barnett, Jermier a. Lafferty 2006). Empirical studies using measurement approaches for corporate reputation range from specific explorative approaches merely describing the construct of reputation (Walsh and Beatty 2007) to studies which embed more sophisticated models of corporate reputation in a wider nomological network. The latter regard corporate reputation as an intangible asset interacting with firm-related antecedents and economic consequences (Money a. Hillebrand 2006). This paper aims at providing an overview of major challenges facing the researcher or reputation manager when building or using a measurement tool for reputation.
Defining and Measuring Corporate Reputations
European Management Review, 2016
Corporate reputation is a construct that has gained widespread recognition in the disciplines of strategy, corporate social responsibility, management and marketing because a good reputation is thought to be more commercially valuable than a bad reputation. However, recent reviews of the scholarly literature suggest that because the construct of corporate reputation has been defined in a wide variety of ways it is difficult to understand the antecedents and consequences of the construct. To illustrate this problem 50 different definitions of corporate reputations are reviewed. This analysis suggests that some of the most prominent measures are not grounded in the definitions that are thought to underpin them. This phenomena presents a challenge to anybody wanting to meta-analyze findings and to build new theories of corporate reputation. To help advance the field a framework is presented to guide the refinement of scholarly definitions so that they are well constructed and thus capable of guiding the development of valid measures of the construct. To illustrate this framework a new definition and some new measures are provided.
Looking Back: Reputation Research Published in the Journal of Management
Journal of Management, 2010
This issue of the Journal of Management includes a series of three articles on reputation. "Reconsidering the Reputation-Performance Relationship: A Resource-Based View" was written by Brian Boyd, Donald Bergh, and David Ketchen (2010). Boyd et al. reanalyzed the data from 107 business schools in the United States (used in a study by Rindova, Williamson, Petkova, & Sever, 2005) to develop and test a resource-based view of reputation and performance. Violina Rindova, Ian Williamson, and Antoaneta Petkova became aware of this in press article and submitted a proposal to follow up Boyd et al.'s article with their article "Reputation as an Intangible Asset: Reflections on Theory and Methods in Two Empirical Studies of Business School Reputations." In the spirit of completing the discussion, I asked Boyd et al. to write a response (Bergh, Ketchen, Boyd, & Bergh, 2010), which resulted in the three articles appearing in this issue. These three articles led me to reflect on the wide range of reputation research published in the Journal of Management. What follows is a summary of reputation research spanning 27 years and looking forward into 2011. Looking Back: Reputation Research Work on reputation has also led to important Review Issue articles at the Journal of Mana gement. For example, Scott Highhouse, Margaret Brooks, and Gary Greguras (2009) wrote a review article titled "An Organizational Impression Management Perspective on the Formation of Corporate Reputations," which examined the role of reputation research from the perspective of corporations as social actors. They discussed the differences and similarities between organizational reputation, image, identity, and legitimacy. Looking forward, authors are currently working on a 2011 Review Issue article titled "Organizational Reputation: A Review." Another article on reputation and business schools generated a great deal of discussion.
Corporate Reputation: Fashion, Fad, or Phenomenon?
Corporate Reputation Review, 2017
In this paper I examined whether corporate reputation was a fad or fashion in organization science research. If corporate reputation was a fad, then we would see a sharp increase and subsequent sharp decrease in research. I performed a content analysis exploring the way in which authors described their work in leading management and business and society journals. I focused on four corporate associations (corporate celebrity, corporate identity, corporate image, and corporate reputation) to operationalize a fashion to which corporate reputation research may belong. Following prior research on fads and fashions on organization management research, I counted the incidence of these four constructs in article titles, abstracts and key words from 1997 through 2016. I observed a steady increase in the number of articles about corporate celebrity, corporate identity, corporate image, and corporate reputation over twenty years rejecting the old assertions that research about corporate reputation and related corporate associations was a fad. The number of articles on corporate reputation equaled the number of articles about the other three corporate associations. I found no evidence of a fashion; however, as more time passes scholars may find that research on corporate reputation and related constructs comprised a fashion. Surprisingly I observed that the number of articles on corporate reputation published in the two business and society journals was twice the number of articles published in the six general management journals. In conclusion, I find evidence that corporate reputation research has become a phenomenon especially in the business & society and ethics field.
The Formation of Organizational Reputation
Academy of Management Annals, 2018
In this article, we review four decades of research on the formation of organizational reputation. Our review reveals six perspectives that have informed past studies: a game theoretic, a strategic, a macro-cognitive, a micro-cognitive, a cultural-sociological, and communicative one. We compare and contrast the different assumptions about what reputation is and how it forms that characterize these perspectives, and we discuss the implications of these differences for our theoretical understanding of stability and change, control and contestation, and the micro-macro relationship in the complex process of reputation formation. SIX PERSPECTIVES ON REPUTATION FORMATION Our review of past studies in management and organization revealed six different perspectives on organizational reputation and its formation. The first one is rooted in the economics of information and signalling; the second reflects strategic management analyses of reputation as an intangible asset; the third and fourth perspectives emphasize the macro (collective) and micro (individual) socio-cognitive aspects of reputations, respectively. The fifth perspective rooted in cultural sociology, focuses on socio-political processes; and a sixth one stresses the constitutive role of communication and interactions in reputation formation. 2 These six perspectives start from fundamentally different assumptions. However, the relatively high number of articles we found that draw on multiple perspectives (see Appendix 1) attests to the significant potential for integration and cross-fertilization between them. One possible approach to integrating these perspectives involves positioning these perspectives as different, but equally valid, approaches to the study of organizational reputation under different conditions and at different levels of analysis. For example, while the game-theoretic and strategic perspectives are well suited to analyze strategic interactions among a few known players, the macro-cognitive, cultural-sociological, and communicative perspectives focus on the formation of reputation in complex environments with heterogeneous actors, interests, and roles. To better understand the strengths and weaknesses of each these perspectives, in this section we briefly review the differences in their fundamental 2 To systematically review the literature on organizational reputation, we searched for the term "reputation" in the title or abstract of ten top journals in management studies (Academy of Management Review, Academy of
Academy of Management Journal, 2005
We examined the extent to which organizations' reputations encompass different types of stakeholders' perceptions, which may have differential effects on economic outcomes. Specifically, we propose that reputation consists of two dimensions: (1) stakeholders' perceptions of an organization as able to produce quality goods and (2) organizations' prominence in the minds of stakeholders. We empirically examined the distinct antecedents and consequences of these two dimensions of reputation in the context of U.S. business schools. Results suggest that prominence, which derives from the choices of influential third parties vis-à-vis an organization, contributes significantly to the price premium associated with having a favorable reputation. We would like to thank Associate Editor Marshall Schminke and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This paper has also benefited from the comments of Dax Basdeo,
2002
An organization undertaking competitive actions possesses different "reputations" that vary in terms of their perception among stakeholders. This paper is about perception, that is, how do viewers come to perceive an organization in a certain way. We review the processes of reputation and identity. Further, we explain perceptual space and its' implications for reputation formation. Lastly we provide some food for thought for recreating reputations in today's chaotic globalized business world.
Reputation and Firm Performance: A Research Agenda
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2022
Various researchers have investigated the reputation and firm performance relationship with the perspectives of different disciplines. This study is a semisystematic literature review that examines articles in top-ranked journals to analyze how the reputation and firm performance relationship has evolved in terms of theoretical backgrounds, variables, methodologies and the scope of the reputationperformance relationship. Classifications of the reputation and firm performance relationship articles are highlighted in four broad areas: financial performance, sustainability performance, marketing performance and organizational performance. The results of this study showed that the number of the published articles has increased gradually through the analysis period, and majority of the articles investigated the firm reputation and financial performance relationship. Due to the results a research agenda is developed for future research.