Reputation, Bureaucratic Autonomy, and International Organizations: Research at the World Bank and the Doing Business Controversy

Research on organizational reputation of public sector agencies gained significant attention in the last years. Scholars explored how reputational concerns influence the behavior of public bodies and how bureaucratic autonomy is linked with reputation and reputational management. Regardless of these stimulating debates, the international organizations (IOs) scholarship has largely remained quarantined from these developments. This article aims to fill the gap in our understanding of organizational reputation in the context of IOs and international public administrations (IPAs). It rectifies the concept of organizational reputation for the study of change, behavior and activities of IOs/IPAs. In addition, it identifies four specific challenges IOs/IPAs face in their reputational management. The empirical section illustrates the new insights that accounts based on studying organizational reputation offer to the field of IOs/IPAs. The first case study discusses the emergence of the World Bank as a global economic research center in the mid-1960s; the second case analyzes the Bank’s response to an unprecedented public controversy about its Doing Business report in late 2021.