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This article analyzes the links between financial reports and reputation in the context of Finnish public sector organizations. In general, the paper discusses the accounting treatment of intangible and tangible assets and the quality and relevance of public sector financial reporting.

For data, we combine three data sets: financial statement information of eight anonymous Finnish public organizations, the results of a reputation survey among their key stakeholders (N = 914) and a sample of the social media sentiment around the organizations.

Our findings suggest that a decrease in spending and, surprisingly in the nonprofit sector, an increase in the surplus, indicate better perceived financial performance. An increase in surplus is positively linked with the reputational factors, for example, trust. However, disclosing excessive amounts of information, for example, in financial reporting seems to contribute to negative discussions on social media.

We highlight the importance of managing intangibles, including those not recognized in the balance sheet, such as reputation. We present three propositions with potential managerial relevance.

Despite the considerable amount of financial information disclosed by public sector organizations, few studies have analyzed its relevance or connection to reputation. This first-of-a-kind paper combines intangible and tangible assets by analyzing how financial data and intangible reputation are linked in the public sector accounting context. Six reputational factors were discovered, and financial performance was found to correlate with trust in the public sector.

Intangible assets and reputation play a considerable and complex role in acquisitions. Targets with better reputations are more attractive, yet may fetch a premium. Though the intangibles drive many transactions, the ability of an acquirer to leverage intangibles and reputation specifically after the transaction is more problematic. Two characteristics of reputation – mobility and transferability – are introduced to reflect the degree to which a target’s positive reputation may accrue to the buyer following an acquisition. Acquirer experience, hubris and cultural differences between acquirer and target may moderate the relationships between these characteristics of reputation and acquisition outcomes. Implications for practitioners are offered, including when acquiring firms should look for reputation capture vs. spillover, and when employee retention and internal communication should be the focus vs. integration and external communication.

The authors explore how social approval assets, namely status and reputation, are used to legitimate and categorise a new national university. They argue that in the course of the legitimation process, status and reputation work as stakeholder-oriented value-creating benefits. The authors specifically analyse the discursive constructions and labels used in the process and how the process enables nationwide university reform.

The authors’ longitudinal case study utilises critical discourse analysis and analyses media and policy discourses regarding the birth of Aalto University.

The findings suggest that the legitimation of the new university was accomplished through the use of two distinct discourses: one on higher education and another on the market economy. These discourses not only sought to legitimise the new university as categorically different from existing Finnish universities, but also rationalised the merger using the expected reputation and status benefits that were claimed would accrue for supporters.

This study elaborates on the role of various social approval assets and labels in legitimation processes and explores how policy enforcement can take place in arenas that are not necessarily perceived as policymaking. For managers, it is crucial to understand how a chosen label (name) can result in both stakeholder support and resistance, and how important it is to anticipate the changes a label can invoke.

The authors propose that the use of several labels regarding a new organisation is strategically beneficial to attracting multiple audiences who may hold conflicting interests in terms of what the organisation and its offerings should embody. They propose that even though status and reputation have traditionally been defined as possessions of an organisation, they should be further understood as concepts used to disseminate and justify the interests, norms, structures and values in a stakeholder network.

To examine how relations with social groups, including shareholders, customers, employees and vendors among other stakeholders are pivotal to generating wealth and optimising long‐term shareholder value.

The paper explores the values intrinsic in stakeholder relations and examines why it should be included in the core of evaluation, auditing and management of organisations to create wealth, value and corporate profit.

The concept of organisations with values that extend from physical assets, intellectual property, process, know‐how, knowledge brand and reputation attributes is understood as being part of the value of companies. Stakeholder relationships are intangible assets and there is a significant body of opinion that identifies intangible assets as a major driver in the global economy, corporate survival and success. There is a pivotal management role in relationship management which is the lever by which value from intangibles is optimised.

Describes how, for companies in the twenty‐first century, the creation of value increasingly depends on intangible assets such as knowledge, systems, data, intellectual property, brands and market relationships. This opens up a new area of public relations practice whereby public relations managers take responsibility for the creation of value through relationships throughout organisations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of prior-CSR reputation in protecting a company’s CSR reputation during product-harm crises and how it influences consumers’ crisis-related behavioral intentions (i.e. supportive communication, resistance to negative information and crisis resiliency). The authors test whether the impact of prior-CSR reputation differs by crisis type as well.

A randomized 2 (CSR reputation: good vs bad) × 2 (product-harm crisis type: tampering vs preventable) full factorial design in two industry settings (food industry and retail industry) with consumer samples was conducted.

The results revealed the determinant role of positive prior-CSR reputation in protecting reputational assets. A company with positive CSR reputation experiences no decrease in its CSR reputation during victim crises and fairly minor decreases during preventable crises. However, a company with a bad prior-CSR reputation experiences a greater decline in its CSR reputation across both crises; the level of decline during victim crises was as substantial as the decline experienced during a preventable crisis. The prior-CSR reputation directly affects consumers’ crisis-related intentions, and indirectly does so through post-CSR reputation. As post-CSR reputation becomes more positive, consumers display greater resistance to negative information, supportive communication intent and crisis resiliency.

This study advances the understanding of the role of corporate reputation during crises and provides additional empirical evidence of how the buffering effect of CSR can extend beyond product-related intentions among consumers. The findings can induce companies to adopt CSR programs more systematically and proactively under a long-term strategic plan.

Scholarship on reputation in and of organizations has been going on for decades, and it always has separated along level of analysis issues, whereby the separate literatures on individual, group/team/unit, and organization reputation fail to acknowledge each other. This sends the implicit message that reputation is a fundamentally different phenomenon at the three different levels of analysis. We tested the validity of this implicit assumption by conducting a multilevel review of the reputation literature, and drawing conclusions about the “level-specific” or “level-generic” nature of the reputation construct. The review results permitted the conclusion that reputation phenomena are essentially the same at all levels of analysis. Based on this, we frame a future agenda for theory and research on reputation.

The purpose of this paper is to aid the convergence of design and management as a strategic lever and innovative tool to improve corporate reputation in higher education institutions (HEIs), particularly in the Polytechnic Institute of Bragança, Portugal (IPB).

SWOT analysis is used to identify strengths and weaknesses in the context of an organization’s internal competencies (identity) and opportunities and threats in an analysis of the organization’s external competitive context (image). Quantitative analysis was used based on questionnaires conducted with IPB community to analyse if differences exist between identity (staff) and image (students) and where there are design structures (website, visual identity, advertising and environment. Corporate character scale developed by Davies et al. (2003, 2004) was used.

With the SWOT analysis, it is possible to outline IPB performance strategies that meet a positive reputation. A positive corporate reputation was found in IPB with the study of corporate character scale. It has been realized where there are differences from the point of view of identity and image, and thus, it is possible to indicate ideas of improvement to increase the competitiveness of HEIs.

The study is restricted to five schools of IPB. It would also be pertinent to broaden the scope of the stakeholders, encompassing the external community of the IPB that is extending the study to the external public, such as parents, companies, suppliers and secondary students.

HEI competitiveness implies student recruitment and public policies. A positive reputation implies a positive brand image. Design competencies of the public higher education sector can go much further acting at the strategic level, establishing its directives of action in the markets where it operates to reflect its corporate reputation in a positive way in the mind of the consumer. Intangible assets such as identity, image and corporate reputation, appear as very valuable elements, presenting an increasing importance in the management of universities that entered a market context where sustainability requires the adoption of more entrepreneurial management guidelines.

The paper is useful for the professionals and academics in perceiving the importance of use management and strategical tools to identify HEI communication and reputation difficulties for a thorough design thinking that delineates solutions that leverage the competitiveness of service organizations such as HEIs.

The purpose of this chapter is to review the accumulated research on a strategically important intangible asset – organizational reputation – and articulate promising research pathways forward. To do so, I first provide definitional clarity by comparing reputation to the related constructs of status, celebrity, legitimacy, and social approval and highlight the codifiable, cumulative, and beneficial nature of reputation. I then discuss three developments in reputation literature: (1) conceptualizing reputation as a multidimensional, rather than generalized, construct; (2) theorizing about reputational malleability rather than its path dependence; and (3) focusing on the costs of a high reputation in addition to its benefits. Based on these developments and the increasing role of social media in affecting and reflecting stakeholder perceptions, I discuss three pathways for future reputation research. Specifically, I focus on the decrease in credibility of powerful intermediaries and increase in stakeholder empowerment, conceptualization of reputation as a flow rather than a stock, and the role of strategic reticence. My hope is that this chapter will stimulate conceptual and empirical work on the role of reputation in the complex and dynamic era of social media.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether, in the context of a cross-border acquisition, the acquirer’s country image (CI) could moderate the relationship between the acquirer’s corporate reputation (CR) and consumers’ repurchase intentions towards the products of the post-acquisition target.

The authors examined the roles played by the acquirer’s CR and the acquirer’s CI on consumer behaviour by considering an Italian target firm with a high reputation and comparing four foreign acquiring firms with different combinations of CR (poor/good) and CI (high/low).

It was found that both CR and CI have a significant impact on Italian consumers’ intention to repurchase the products of the post-acquisition target. Furthermore, the results show a greater increase in consumers’ repurchase intentions when a good reputation of the acquirer is paired with a high CI for the acquirer, but a high CI cannot compensate for a poor CR.

The research investigates, in the context of cross-border acquisitions (CBAs), the impact of the acquirer’s CR and the acquirer’s CI on the host country consumers’ repurchase intentions after the CBA, which has not previously been thoroughly examined. It can help managers to understand the conditions under which CBAs will be favourably evaluated.