Organizational Reputation and EU Regulatory Agencies

The last few decades have been marked by the growth of EU agencies across various regulatory sectors, e.g. financial markets, environment, chemicals, food safety, energy supply. One observes the variation in how regulation has been designed and practised across regulatory domains. While some agencies tend to focus more on the procedural or ethical aspects of their regulatory processes, other agencies emphasise their regulatory outcomes. To conceptualise diverse regulatory practices and explain the variation the paper draws on the bureaucratic reputation theory. It argues that agencies can play different reputation promotion games: agencies have a repository of strategies that they combine in various ways to deal with attacks exercised by diverse external audiences. Agencies decide to focus their attention on managing present or future risks by following distinct regulatory formal and informal practices and by prioritising one external audience over another. Which aspects of their bureaucratic reputation agencies chose to emphasise is expected to depend on the institutional risks that agencies face in their organisational fields. The paper draws on primary documents, agency communication (e.g. press releases), and media reports to explore how EU regulatory agencies – deemed to be highly technical and scientific bodies – secure their reputation vis-à-vis conflicting audiences. It makes several contributions to the scholarship of bureaucratic reputation: it introduces and maps the diverse reputational strategies of EU regulatory agencies and provides theoretical explanations of when and under what conditions the regulatory strategies of EU agencies vary.