Studies on organizational crisis communication via social media have mainly focused on the effects of messages from one source, organizations. Little is known about the interaction effects of multiple messages from multiple sources through social media on audiences’ perceptions of organizational reputation. Guided by the Message Convergence Framework, this study used a 2 × 2, between-subjects experiment (N = 165) to explore the impact of crisis communication strategies and message convergence on Facebook on audiences’ perceived organizational reputation in a preventable crisis. The results suggest that organizational reputation was affected by the consistency between the organization’s Facebook posts and followers’ comments, and the effects were moderated by the perceived credibility of the comments by Facebook followers. The results also revealed that unlike pre-existing positive attitudes toward an organization, which were negatively affected by inconsistent information on Facebook, pre-existing negative attitudes did not change significantly because of the information on Facebook. The theoretical and practical implications of this study are then discussed.

Large corporations and industry groups have always used mass communication media to inform and educate important stakeholders and the general public on issues where corporate reputation and public trust are intertwined, and where any deterioration in the linkage can have significant negative consequences. An emerging trend in this direction has been the explosive growth in the voluntary publication of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. These reports, however, are vulnerable to corporate embellishments, which may erode their value as reputation-building instruments. To examine this situation, this paper provides a detailed and systematic analysis of 48 of the world’s largest corporations in the extractive industry (i.e., mining and minerals, oil and gas, and support services) that have published CSR reports in 2012. The extractive industry’s operations invariably raise important environmental, sociopolitical, and governance issues that are subject to heightened levels of public and regulatory scrutiny. Hence, their CSR reports carry a heavy burden of providing high-quality information that would engender public trust. Our examination of CSR reports of corporations is conducted through an analytical structure called the CSR-Sustainability Monitor® – the first system of its kind in the world that enables overall evaluations and comparisons of each CSR report with any other CSR report or group of CSR reports in our database. Our analysis shows that these companies’ CSR reports generally provide extensive information on major environmental, social, and governance issues. But they are less forthcoming on many controversial aspects of their operations that impact the public domain. This is unfortunate because it reduces public trust in the quality of these reports and undermines the value of one of the most important instruments of public communication available to the companies. Finally, we provide some suggestions that companies may incorporate into their CSR reports going forward.

Concepts like reputation, recognition, legitimacy, visibility, image, popularity, trust and others are frequently used in describing how successful an organization’s communication has been in describing properties and qualities of its activities. In this paper we seek to schematically address some of these concepts as they often appear in current communication/PR, organizational and sociological research to examine what qualities and criteria these concepts tend to refer to. By way of situating our discussion in a broader context of how a neo-institutional perspective understands organizational performance, we seek to identify and suggest some of the central qualities of the most popular concepts. We combine then the different qualities these concepts invoke and suggest a model that can be used in a more accurate discussion of an organization’s communication.

When shareholders become dissatisfied with a public company’s policies or actions, they may resort to activist interventions. Shareholder activism has been described as an attempt to resolve agency conflicts by directly influencing management or board decisions. Shareholder activism may be incited by a lack of focus on shareholder value, a misalignment of corporate governance or a number of social and environmental policy issues. Over recent years, shareholder activism has become more frequent, professional and costly to corporations. Large, visible companies are held to be most susceptible to activist interventions, potentially damaging their corporation reputation. In this study, we analyze the effect of a good corporate reputation on the susceptibility of public companies to shareholder interventions in the form of proxy fights. We consider both the frequency and success of shareholder proposals and differentiate the effect of corporate reputation by issues context. Our findings indicate that a good corporate reputation serves as a two-fold inoculation against shareholder interventions, reducing both the frequency and success of proxy fights.

Emerging markets face unique challenges of issues and business practices that border in the grey areas of questionable ethical norms, inadequate transparency in reporting relating to funding, financial transactions and in the appointment of business associates and partners. Market realities in emerging markets such as India impose unique challenges for organisations striving to practice their intent. Issues of governance, regulatory frameworks and transparency pose considerable roadblocks. This paper measures the perceptions of principal stakeholders, that is, corporate executives, purposively selected from across varied business sectors spanning the technology, manufacturing, consulting, financial services, consumer goods, NGOs and the educational sectors in emerging market context to identify factors and attributes considered as significant for corporate reputation (CR) building though they are not part of the reputation models developed for the western and developed markets context. The role of ethical values and practices, active boardroom management, ethical branding and corporate communication, organisation’s core values, innate culture and professed purpose and principles in CR and branding are found to be significant. The study shows that CR building is adversely affected by excessive focus on financial results and government regulations.

This paper explores how the degree of underlying ambivalence toward a certain organization influences the stability of people’s reputation judgments when new information is provided as well as how this information, in turn, influences people’s sense of ambivalence. Results from one experiment demonstrate that individuals who are highly ambivalent toward an organization display a greater amount of change in reputational judgments when exposed to new information (either positive or negative) compared with those who are less ambivalent. The results also indicate that ambivalence scores change significantly after people are exposed to new information, suggesting that people use new information to diminish their sense of ambivalence when possible. Taken together, the results of the study suggest novel theoretical and practical implications for reputation management.