At the supra-individual level, it concerns groups, communities, collectives and abstract social entities (such as firms, corporations, organizations, countries, cultures and even civilizations).
Mark C. Suchman (1995) examines the relationship between legitimacy, status, and reputation, emphasizing that while these concepts are interconnected, they represent distinct forms of social evaluation.
[11] Economists use game-theory to describe corporate reputations as strategic signals that companies use to convey to markets some of their qualities and abilities.
[12] Sociologists view corporate reputation as descriptions of the relative status that companies occupy in an institutional field of rivals and stakeholders.
Corporate reputations are found to influence the attractiveness of ranked companies as suppliers of products, as prospective employers, and as investments.
For instance, reputation is said to be convergent with adjacent concepts like corporate image, identity, celebrity, status, legitimacy, social approval (likability), and visibility (prominence), but discriminant from related constructs like stigma and infamy.
[43][44] Many organizations create public relations and corporate communication departments dedicated to assisting companies with reputation management.
The growth of the public relations industry has largely been due to the rising demand for companies to establish credibility and reputation.
For example, in 1999 Coca-Cola lost $60 million (by its own estimate) after schoolchildren reported suffering from symptoms like headaches, nausea and shivering after drinking its products.
A growing number of people in the business world now have the word "reputation" in their titles – including Dow Chemical, SABMiller, Coca-Cola, Allstate, Repsol YPF, Weber Shandwick, and GlaxoSmithKline (although no longer).
Social media like Twitter, Linked In, and Facebook have made it increasingly important for companies to monitor their online reputations in order to anticipate and respond to criticisms of their actions.
"[47] In order to best recover from negative complaints on social media, it is important for a company to prove its authenticity by providing more specific answers directly to its critics.
A corporate reputation can be managed, accumulated and traded in for trust, legitimization of a position of power and social recognition, and people are prepared to pay a premium price for goods and services offered, which in turn generates higher customer loyalty, a stronger willingness from shareholders to hold on to shares in times of crisis, and greater likelihood to invest in the company's stock.
Therefore, it becomes essential to integrate public relations into corporate governance to manage the relationships between these stakeholders which will enhance the organization's reputation.
Corporations or institutions which behave ethically and govern in a good manner build reputational capital which is a competitive advantage.
As a consequence, public relations must be used in order to establish long lasting relationships with the stakeholders, which will enhance the reputation of the company.
In the study of cooperation and social dilemmas, for instance, the role of reputation as a partner selection mechanism started to be appreciated in the early 1980s.
Moreover, the expression "it is said that John Smith is a cheater" is intrinsically a reputation spreading act, because on one hand it refers to a (possibly false) common opinion, and on the other the very act of saying "it is said" is self-assessing, since it provides at least one factual occasion when that something is said, because the person who says so (the gossiper), while appearing to spread the saying a bit further, may actually be in the phase of initiating it.
While most cases seem to share the characteristic of being primarily used to predict future behavior, they can have, for example, manipulative sub-goals, even more important than the forecast.
Roughly speaking, the advice could fall under one of the following three categories : Note the care to maintain the possible levels of truth (the adviser declares – but could be lying – it believes – but could be wrong – etc..).
It may concern a subset of the target's characteristics, i.e., its willingness to comply with socially accepted norms and customs, or its skills (ways), or its definition as pertaining to a precise agent.
While image only moves (when transmitted and accepted) from one individual cognition to another, the anonymous character of reputation makes it a more complex phenomenon.
For a company, its reputation is how esteemed it is in the eyes of its employees, customers, investors, talent, prospective candidates, competitors, analysts, alumni, regulators and the list goes on.
[59] Additionally, establishing and maintaining a strong reputation serves as a significant motivator for individuals to actively engage in online communities.
[61] Given the number of sites on the Internet, it is impossible to manually monitor the entire web for pages that may affect one's online reputation.
These tools track mentions of a brand or product on the Internet, on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and other social networking sites and websites.
[64] Due to the fact that if someone has a bad online reputation, they can easily change their pseudonym, new accounts on sites such as eBay or Amazon are usually distrusted.
According to one study, 84% of responding business leaders saw the greatest reputation threat online to companies as negative media coverage.
[citation needed] The next two greatest threats are customer complaints in the media or on grievance sites online (71%) and negative word of mouth (54%).
A recent alleged example is that of Dr. Anil Potti, who resigned from Duke University after it was discovered that he had misrepresented himself on his resume and became the subject of a scientific misconduct investigation.