Abstract
Reputation is of growing interest for the study of public bureaucracies, but a measurement that can discern between the subdimensions of reputation and is validated on real‐life audiences has remained elusive. The authors deductively build, test, and cross‐validate a survey instrument through two surveys of 2,100 key stakeholders of the European Chemicals Agency, the European Union chemicals regulator. This empirical tool measures an agency's reputation and its building blocks. This scale represents an important contribution to reputation literature, as it allows scholars to distinguish and measure which aspects of reputation public organizations are “known for” and build their claim to authority on, as well as how the profiles of public organizations differ. The authors find that direct stakeholder contact with the agency is necessary for stakeholders to be able to evaluate the separate dimensions of reputation independently.Evidence for Practice This study equips practitioners with a reputation barometer tailored to the public sector. It allows them to measure the reputation of their organization, in a differentiated fashion, among different stakeholder groups.While public organizations increasingly engage in reputation management activities, a potential caveat that emerges from our exercise is that managers might be steering in non‐astute directions. While our study shows that, as for private actors, “performance matters,” procedural and moral aspects also weigh heavily in the eyes of stakeholders when it comes to public regulators.To secure a positive organizational image and the authority crucial for public agencies to operate, the performance management turn in the public sector may need to be supplemented by an enhanced organizational attention to procedural and moral aspects.
Highlights
Reputation is of growing interest for the study of public bureaucracies, but a measurement that is able to discern between the constituting dimensions of reputation, and that is validated on real-life audiences of a public agency has remained elusive
Our study provides a close picture of the relevant constituent parts of reputation for a public organization because it surveys individuals who have a relatively closer knowledge and experience of interaction with the agency, and whose views are crucial for the organizational success of the agency itself
We were able to develop and validate a measurement of public organizational reputation, with sub-component dimensions. We believe this represents an important step towards developing a generalized measurement instrument for gaging stakeholder perceptions of public sector organizations
Summary
Reputation is of growing interest for the study of public bureaucracies, but a measurement that is able to discern between the constituting dimensions of reputation, and that is validated on real-life audiences of a public agency has remained elusive. The complexity of capturing organizational reputation is perhaps best-illustrated by Daniel Carpenter’s Reputation and Power (2010), which methodically draws on a variety of methods -both historical narrative and statistical analysis- and employs varied sources of data ranging from extensive use of archival documents, to interviews, to additional sources such as scientific magazines, medical journals, and web logs, among others This approach invariably raises the question of how to translate these findings in different contexts, the possibility of testing, replicating – and fundamentally of falsifying— the approach and its central predictions in different organizational and administrative contexts. While of growing focus and interest for the study of the bureaucracy, a measurement that is able to satisfactorily discern between the constituting dimensions of reputation, and that is validated on real-life audiences of an actual public sector agency has remained far elusive
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