What is it about?
How do you form your views about corporations? Why do you think Walmart or Target is bad or good? What would change your mind? Though the reputation literature is largely based on the idea that a firm's reputation is a function of its behaviors, here we look at the way in which reputation rankings -- of which there are now many -- affect how people form their opinions and make sense of those behaviors.
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Why is it important?
It shows the power that rankings have over our perceptions of corporations and suggests that a firm's reputation can be sticky, creating a disconnect between its behavior and how it is perceived. It also suggests that managing rankings agencies may be more impactful than changing behaviors in some instances (unfortunately).
Perspectives
We like to think that we judge firms based on what they do, but we don't really have the ability to know much about what most firms do most of the time, so we rely on others, like Fortune, to tell us about firms. That can create problems that we need to acknowledge.
Prof Michael L Barnett
Rutgers University Newark
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Sorry to (Not) Burst Your Bubble: The Influence of Reputation Rankings on Perceptions of Firms, Business & Society, April 2016, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0007650316643919.
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