Reputation and bureaucratic politics

Abstract

Organizational reputation is a relatively new theoretical perspective that has increasingly been used by bureaucratic politics' scholarship to explain public organizations' outputs, processes, and behaviour. Seminal work of Daniel Carpenter (2010) has demonstrated the potential of an organizational reputation account to fill relevant research gaps in explaining the developments of American bureaucracy, which has soon started gaining momentum outside the US context and even extended to supranational bureaucracies such as the EU. The underlining argument of organization reputation scholarship is that public organizations engage in strategic, adaptive, and even opportunistic endeavours to gain, (re-)establish, maintain, or enhance a good organizational reputation which is argued to have implications for public organizations' legitimacy, authority, and power. The distinctive feature of organizational reputation scholarship is its meticulous consideration of public organisations' audiences and how public organizations manage audiences' expectations regarding their organizational conduct. In order to influence external audiences' judgements about their overall organizational conduct, public organizations - according to bureaucratic reputation theory - engage in strategic reputation management activities. Reputational considerations were found to affect how public organizations communicate and respond to grave public allegations, the content and timing of their core outputs, as well as public organizations' performance, cooperation choices, and accountability practices. The chapter introduces the core theoretical arguments of bureaucratic reputation theory, reviews empirical studies, and identifies future research avenues.