The core of organizational reputation: Taking multidimensionality and audience multiplicity seriously

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. While most scholarly attention has focused on studying agency reactions to reputational threat (Maor 2016), recent work has proposed tools for systematic measurement of different dimensions of reputation (Lee and van Rysin’s 2019; Overman, Busuioc and Wood 2020). 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. Our findings confirm the multidimensionality of agency reputation, and point to important variations in the conception of reputation across different stakeholders and different subunits of the EU Commission. 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.