The Core of Organizational Reputation: Taking Multidimensionality and Audience Multiplicity Seriously. The Case of the EU Commission

Reputation-based studies have shown that a public agency’s reputation is a valuable political asset that increases the autonomy and legitimacy of the agency (Carpenter 2010; Maor 2015). Agencies therefore care about their reputation and go to great lengths to protect and nurture it. One would therefore expect that considerable scholarly effort would be devoted to measuring the reputation of public agencies. However, surprisingly, the literature has not engaged in developing systematic measures of reputation as such, but instead focused on studying reactions to reputational threats (Maor 2016). In fact, the reputational literature has not generated a measurement tool of organizational reputation, and we therefore know surprisingly little about what reputation public agencies have to start with. However, with Lee and van Ryzin’s (2019) and Overman, Busuioc and Wood’s (2020) contributions this situation is changing. Reputational scholars now have the tools available for a systematic mapping of organizations’ stock of reputation that can capture variation across reputational dimensions as well as audience types. The next natural development in reputational research is to use these measures to investigate core elements of reputational theory. The first step on this path is to subject the theoretical building blocks of the concept to empirical scrutiny: multidimensionality, multiplicity, subjectivity and within-agency variation. The purpose of our paper is to investigate these elements by studying the reputation of the EU Commission. The data to do so stem from a survey of stakeholders from the EU’s Transparency Register. Carpenter, Daniel. 2010. Reputation and Power. Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lee, Danbee and Gregg G. Van Ryzin. 2019. “Measuring bureaucratic reputation: Scale development and validation”, Governance 32(1): 177– 192. Maor, Moshe. 2015. “Theorizing Bureaucratic Reputation”, pp. 17-37 in Arild Wæraas and Moshe Maor (eds.). Organizational Reputation in the Public Sector. London: Routledge. Maor, Moshe. 2016. “Missing areas in the bureaucratic reputation framework”, Politics and Governance 4(2): 80-90. Overman, Sjors, Madalina Busuioc and Matthew Wood. 2020. “A Multidimensional Reputation Barometer for Public Agencies: A Validated Instrument”, Public Administration Review 80(3): 415-425.