Reputation management for creative workers in the media industry

ABSTRACT

Creative workers in media industries work under particular employment conditions and structures that can be described as “atypical employment”. For most of the creative workforce, employment is not full-time, and the average annual income is low and unpredictable. It is important for the creative workforce to know that reputation plays a decisive role in overcoming barriers of entry to networks, and obstacles to employment in artistic-creative projects. Thus, it is crucial to learn how reputational capital can be built, developed, preserved and expanded. Therefore, this paper will present a theoretical framework for reputation management that demonstrates the complex cause-and-effect relationships among a creative worker’s reputational capital as an intangible resource in a media network. It will be shown that a creative worker’s personal branding has instrumental value for the development and maintenance of reputational capital. Moreover, this paper conceptualises reputation management based on a review of related literature for the purpose of conceptual development.

KEYWORDS:

• Atypical employment
• creative workers
• signalling theory
• networking
• reputational capital
• personal brand

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joachim Eigler

Joachim Eigler is the Chair of Business Administration and Media Management at Faculty III – School of Economic Disciplines of the University of Siegen, Germany. He was born in 1966 and studied Business Administration at the University of Regensburg. He obtained a doctoral degree in 1995 and qualified as a professor in 2001. At the University of Siegen, he established Media Management as a new discipline in research and teaching both for bachelor’s and master’s degrees. His research interests are in media products, media markets, the movie business and film finance, e-business and e-commerce. He is currently a member of the European Media Management Association.

Samaneh Azarpour

Samaneh Azarpour is a PhD student in Business Administration and Media Management at the University of Siegen in Germany. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Administration and a M.Sc. in Media Management from the University of Tehran. During her study between 2011 and 2012, she was an editor-in-chief of the student Journal of Media Management, where she used and developed her leadership qualifications. She has presented her research at different conferences, including WMEMC and EMMA.