The core of organisational reputation: taking multidimensionality, audience multiplicity, and agency subunits seriously

ABSTRACT

Reputational theory holds that an agency’s reputation is a valuable political asset. However, since Daniel Carpenter’s influential contributions, reputational studies have focused on reactions to reputational threats, rather than on reputation as such. Therefore, there is a curious lacuna at the heart of reputation studies: A lot is known about reactions to reputational threats, but fundamental questions about reputation per se are left unexplored. This paper investigates the dimensionality of the reputational concept, its variation across types of audiences, and its consistency across agency subunits. This is done in the context of the EU Commission, the core executive institution of the European Union. While this case is interesting in itself, its main value is to suggest what a research agenda focusing on the core building blocks of reputational theory might look like. Our survey of actors in the EU’s Transparency Register provides mixed, but mostly supportive evidence.

KEYWORDS:

• Reputation
• dimensionality
• audience types
• subunits
• EU commission

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 To be clear, we do not argue that every single reputational study focuses on reputional threats. For example, a smaller number of studies look into the normative implications of organizational reputation and how it relates to political controllability and bureaucratic accountability (Carpenter & Krause, 2015; Busuioc & Lodge, 2016, 2017; Bertelli & Busuioc, 2021).

2 The exact wording of the question was: ‘Our organization is best characterized as a … ’. The respondents were then asked to choose from a set of 11 pre-defined categories plus a category labelled ‘Other, please specify’. The latter category was subsequently manually recoded. Some respondents choosing this category could be placed in other categories, and among the remaining many were ‘higher education institutions’ for which we added a category.

3 We do not specify the way the respondents interact with the DGs. While this means that interaction may mean different things to different organizations, it ensures that we obtain responses based on what the respondents consider the most relevant DGs for their organization. The exact wording of the question was: ‘We will now ask a number of questions about some of the Directorates-General (DGs) in the Commission that your organization interacts with. Could you please select the DG that your organization interacts most closely with from this list’. The respondents could select up to two DGs.

4 We also conducted multilevel analyses of the same dataset with respondent responses nested in DGs to test the robustness of the control variables. Coefficients of these models are very similar to those reported here, with slight variations in confidence levels (the multilevel model p-values are generally lower). We report the more conservative linear regression models with cluster-corrected errors, as these models quantify differences of reputational perceptions across DGs explicitly.

Additional information

Funding

The research for this article was supported by Independent Research Fund Denmark [grant number 6109-00018B]. The contribution of Moritz Müller was financed by the project RECONNECT, which is financially supported by the funding organisations AEI, ESRC, NWO, and RCN involved in the NORFACE Joint Research Programme on Democratic Governance in a Turbulent Age which is co-funded by the European Commission through Horizon 2020 [grant number 822166].

Notes on contributors

Anne Skorkjær Binderkrantz

Anne Skorkjær Binderkrantz is professor in political science at Aarhus University.

Jens Blom-Hansen

Jens Blom-Hansen is professor in political science at Aarhus University.

Martin Bækgaard

Martin Bækgaard is professor in political science at Aarhus University.

Moritz Müller

Moritz Müller is doctoral researcher at Leiden University.

Søren Serritzlew

Søren Serritzlew is professor in political science at Aarhus University