Identity, Image & Reputation

Brands and corporate reputation are increasingly recognised as some of the most important intangibles that form the backbone of the post-modern economies. Intangible factors help to create brands and corporate reputations which provide the lasting competitive advantage and have become important determinants of organisational performance and value.Persons and organizations are known and described in terms of the attributes that people assign to them. Organizations and persons have multiple identities, images and reputations that change over time. A reputation typically consists of a skewed distribution of beliefs with a greater or lesser degree of conformity among members of an interest group. This is the result of the spread of information and influence in a social network.

March-April, 2002 by Willem Koot
Majken Schultz, Mary Jo Hatch, and Mogens Holten Larsen (eds.): The Expressive Organization. Linking Identity, Reputation and the Corporate Brand
Since Tom Peters' bestseller, In Search of Excellence (1980), in which he concludes from his analysis of fifty successful American corporations that a homogenous, 'strong', outward-looking organizational culture offers a significant competitive advantage, we have been inundated by books about the 'ideal' organization and the management style required to achieve it. In each, the reader is treated to a description of 'the new organization', the exact form of which will depend on the author's opinion of what is needed at that particular moment, given the economic and cultural developments of the day. The titles of these books invariably include some qualifier which holds out the promise of yet another organizational paradigm: the quality organization, the enterprising organization, the empowered organization, the self-managing organization, the flexible organization, or -- extremely pretentious -- 'the organization of the twenty-first century'.
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