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The purpose of this paper is to examine the contemporaneous relationship between changes in corporate reputations and stock prices.

The Harris Interactive Reputation Quotient^TM is used as a measure of corporate reputation. Stock return and risk measures are evaluated for each Reputation Quotient^TM survey period for the years 1999‐2007.

The results provide evidence that, in the aggregate, firm reputations are procyclical. Additionally, firms with improved reputations enjoy lower volatility in their stock prices than firms with diminished reputations.

Due to the Harris Poll Online methodology, it is not clear that the price changes occur concurrently with the change in reputation.

This paper contributes to the finance literature by examining the effect of a change in corporate reputation on stock price.

Sustainability initiatives are important considerations for twenty-first century institutions. Employees, customers and other stakeholders expect responsible business practices that focus on people, profit and planet in unison. Sustainability efforts require a strong advocate who can champion relevant business practices and embed new practices within the culture and across the entire organization. The purpose of this paper is to explain the tangible actions described as necessary by change agents in order to move sustainability initiatives forward in their organizations. This research employs the narrative provided by these agents in interviews – to inform the activities outlined in an established model of political skill and reputation building. This analysis enables the model to illustrate the sequential patterns and process of events, i.e. antecedents and consequences that are simply assumed in the existing variance models.

This research is based on in-depth qualitative interviews with the sustainability managers from a variety of organization and industry contexts (e.g. building products, hospitals, banking, energy, environmental and manufacturing).

The exploration of sustainability initiatives reveals the importance of the change agent’s reputation for building trust in their organizations. Reputation is fostered through political skill and persuasion, while leveraging social capital.

The research is rich in the depth of individual-level phenomena, thereby highlighting the skills necessary to enact change within a variety of industries. However, given the limited sample size, macro-level issues cannot be addressed.

Political skill is a teachable skill that is enhanced through mentoring and coaching. Sustainability initiatives and their organizations can benefit from leveraging persons with strong reputations to facilitate change. When lacking, persons with content knowledge can be groomed to grow their reputation, network, persuasion and political skills.

Sustainability is vital to the future of our earth and humanity. Business and society would benefit from the growth of this phenomenon.

The authors aim to help change agents achieve their objectives through consideration of not just the goals, but the process as well.

The purpose of this paper is to examine factors affecting the relationship between annual changes in the amount of corporate foundation giving and changes in corporate reputation. The factors investigated included the existing corporate reputation and the economic conditions.

Published data were obtained for 77 US corporations during both an upward and downward economic trend. Data for corporate foundation giving were obtained from IRS tax records while data on corporate reputation were obtained from the Reputation Institute’s RepTrak scores.

Linear mixed model analyses demonstrated that a firm’s prior reputation moderates the relationship between corporate philanthropy and changes in corporate reputation during a downward trend. That is, changes in corporate charitable giving and corporate reputation covaried positively for firms with an existing favorable reputation. However, for firms with an unfavorable reputation, there was an inverse relationship between changes in corporate giving and corporate reputation. The interaction between the variables was prevalent only during an economic downturn.

The findings provide firms with relevant information on conditions that affect how changes in charitable giving are likely to impact corporate reputation.

This study is the first to look at the effects of annual changes in corporate charitable giving on corporate reputation and adds to the research literature by demonstrating the complexity of the relationship by identifying two key factors that should be taken into considerations when developing annual budgets for charitable giving.

The purpose of this paper is to expand knowledge of reputation change as a social process and to explore the implications of a social constructivist view of reputation for the challenge of reputation management.

The authors analyze the main characteristics of a social constructivist view of reputation, and study its implications for the task of reputation management by means of an interpretative arena model of reputation change.

The authors build a framework for analyzing reputation change as dialogical interaction between an organization and active stakeholders.

The arena model is a tool for analyzing the task of corporate reputation change management across a variety of contexts. The arena model provides a conceptual tool for making sense of the crucial and intricate challenge of strategic reputation management, which places organizations engaging in struggles and collaborations with the stakeholders in symbolic environments.

The arena model is the first framework seeking to bridge the theoretical challenge of social constructivism with the managerial task of reputation change.

The public sector worldwide is under pressure to downsize, which has led to mergers of public sector organisations. This paper seeks to bridge the unstudied gap of what happens to organisational reputation after a merger. The paper discusses change and reputation in the public sector, and reports findings of a longitudinal study on stakeholder assessments of four public sector organisations undergoing mergers recently.

Following a theory-driven content analysis, this longitudinal study compares stakeholder assessments of four public sector organisations' reputations a year before an organisational merger with assessments of the two resulting organisations' reputations two years after the merger.

The paper finds that the mergers did not really re-shape reputation, but the once established reputation persevered. Although the organisations faced greater expectations after the merger, only minor changes in reputation were detected post-merger: the reputation for expertise, heavy bureaucracy and trustworthiness remained strong after the merger, but certain traits, such as being international and esteemed, were lost. In both cases, one organisation's prior reputation slightly dominated the new reputation.

The findings may be limited to Finland and other Nordic countries, as well as those countries where trust in the public sector is high.

Mergers may not change once-established reputations, and hence the improvements desired by mergers may go unnoticed by the different stakeholders. Organisations merging must prepare for increased stakeholder expectations, as the new organisations arise questions. Previous organisational traits may remain in stakeholders' assessments despite any achieved improvements.

This paper addresses the gap in studying organisational reputation after public sector mergers, and contributes to both theory and practice by providing insight into the stability of once-established reputations.

Strategic management researchers have devoted increasing attention to the study of corporate reputation over the past two decades. Reputation has been conceptualized as a valuable intangible asset, and numerous studies have sought to identify its antecedents and foundations. This chapter recommends a dynamic approach toward reputation research. We argue that studies should examine the processes through which reputational assets are accumulated and depleted over time (i.e. that they should attend to reputational “flows” in addition to reputational “stocks”). We specifically suggest that research focus upon particular corporate actions, examining how (and if) corporate reputations change in their wake. We provide pragmatic and theoretical rationales for this approach toward reputation research. We construct a framework for conducting dynamic, action-focused studies of reputational change. We provide general guidelines for designing such studies, and also provide some specific (i.e. “nuts and bolts”) advice about executing them. We provide one in-depth example of research conducted within this framework. We also identify a number of other corporate actions that could be readily examined using the same methodological and theoretical approach.

The purpose of this paper is to study corporate governance restructuring strategies of companies to adapt to new market conditions following conversion into a for-profit structure. It focuses on the changes in the composition of the board of directors.

The paper conducts a field experiment using stock exchanges, which have become more international over time, and many of which have been forced to demutualize and convert to for-profit structures to compete more efficiently. The paper does a fine-grained analysis of restructuring in the composition of the board using the ANOVA technique. The paper also examines the impact of this board composition restructuring on the reputation of the exchanges using a regression technique.

The authors find that the stock exchanges restructured board composition and refocused them to create better value. Results suggest that the conversion of a company to a for-profit structure brings efficiencies when accompanied by changes in the governing bodies. The authors also find that converting to for-profit firms had a positive impact on the reputation of the exchanges. The positive impact was even greater when accompanied by changes in board composition.

A stronger focus on the corporate governance dimension to understand the successful demutualization of stock exchanges is needed.

The authors analyze the corporate governance dimension during demutualization processes of an under examined sector. The financial performance of the stock exchanges the authors study significantly improved after their conversion to for-profit organizations and provide an example of successful corporate governance restructuring.

This study aims to test Mattingly and Berman’s (2006) taxonomy of social actions and develops divergent expectations for corporate social responsibility (CSR) dimensions directed toward institutional and technical stakeholders, with an aim to determine when CSR directed to different stakeholders is most likely to improve corporate reputation.

A longitudinal sample of 285 major US corporations was used to quantitatively test the hypotheses. Data was sourced from KLD, Osiris and Fortune MAC.

Strengths in CSR and actions directed toward technical stakeholders influence corporate reputation in a more profound way, when compared to those directed toward institutional stakeholders. Contrary to the authors’ prediction, institutional concerns do not demonstrate a significant growth or reduction over the five-year period.

This study provides a longitudinal test of Mattingly and Berman’s (2006) taxonomy of CSR actions and makes an important methodological contribution by operationalizing CSR not as a continuum from strengths to concerns, rather as two distinct constructs.

Management practice can benefit from a more fine-grained approach to stakeholder expectations and reputation outcomes. The results of this study leverage relevant stakeholder impact while allowing firms to appreciate the change in CSR actions and to measure it accordingly, such that the undesirable status quo that leads to potential loss in reputation growth can be avoided.

As organizations explore ways to effectively engage stakeholders for mutual benefit, this research shows how firms can have a positive impact.

This study tests and extends theory through an integrated lens, built on the stakeholder and resource dependence theories, while directing management attention to the broader reputational outcomes of targeted CSR initiatives. It provides justification for CSR investments over time.

This study aims to investigate the impact of strategic and institutional (normative) corporate social responsibility (CSR) on brand value and brand reputation, based on the strategic and legitimacy theory of CSR. It argues that because CSR strengths represent firms’ proactive approach to satisfy their stakeholders’ interests, the authors expect that this proactive approach is likely to generate an accumulated level of reservoir of goodwill that is positively related to the level of brand value. In contrast, the authors would expect that social irresponsibility (CSR concerns), as a measure of firms’ reactive position to stakeholders’ interests, adversely affects the incremental change in this reservoir of goodwill.

This paper measures strategic CSR using CSR strengths and normative (institutional) CSR from CSR concerns scores from the MSCI ESG (Kinder Lydenburg Domini). This paper measures the level of brand value from the Interbrand listing, and it measures the brand reputation based on changes in brand value and brand ranking from Interbrand’s 100 global brands.

This paper finds evidence to support the authors’ theory that one-, two- and three-year lagged CSR strengths positively affect the level of brand value. This study also finds empirical evidence to support the authors’ hypothesis that CSR concerns adversely affect changes in brand value and brand ranking. This study concludes that the differing impacts of CSR strengths and CSR concerns help the authors better understand the impacts of firms’ pro-action and reaction to stakeholders’ interests ion brand values and ranking.

The findings indicate that strategic CSR enhances brand value, while socially irresponsible activities that are against social norms, values and ethics adversely affect the companies’ legitimacy and adversely affect changes in brand reputation.

This research offers a new perspective to distinguish the differing impacts of CSR strengths and concerns on brand value and brand reputation.

This study aims to examine the implications of short-term and long-term reputation change because of government agency responses to firm product defects.

This study’s findings have important implications for both scholars and practitioners. From a scholarly perspective, the authors create a more fine-grained examination of reputation that may be used to assess various performance dimensions. From a practice perspective, managers must realize that reputation can be one of an organization’s most important resources as it meets each of the valuable, rare, inimitable and nonsubstitutable criteria associated with those resources capable of providing sustainable competitive advantage.

Analysis of 17,879 product recalls from 15 automobile manufacturers in the US suggests that firms with higher long-term reputations are more likely to face regulator sanctions when a reputation-damaging event happens. On the other hand, firms with higher short-term reputations are less likely to face sanctions in such circumstances. Finally, firms whose short-term reputation exceeds their long-term reputation are less likely to be sanctioned by regulators when reputation-damaging events occur.

There are several limitations that should be addressed. First, as our reputation measure is based on government investigations of potential defects, vehicles that have never been inspected are not included in the sample. Although this number is likely extremely low, omitting vehicles that have never been inspected leaves out some high-reputation firms from the sample. In addition, the study relies on a single-firm stakeholder that is capable of punitive actions.

From a practical perspective, this study’s findings encourage managers to think about the temporal aspects associated with firm reputation, and to realize that stakeholders may react differently when their expectations are not met depending on an organization’s relative long- and short-term reputations. From a theoretic perspective, the primary contribution of this study is to illustrate how long-term and short-term changes in reputation can provide mixed signals to firm stakeholders regarding future performance.

This study explores the temporal aspects of firm reputation by examining how government sanctions vary depending on firms’ long-term (10 years) and short-term (1 year) reputation. The findings of this study contribute to current reputation research by illustrating the variation in government responses to product defects as a function of short-term and long-term reputation. In doing so, the important role of the timing of firm performance is considered.