What creates corporate reputations and how should organizations respond? Corporate reputation is a growing research field in disciplines as diverse as communication, management, marketing, industrial and organizational psychology, and sociology. As a formal area of academic study, it is relatively young with roots in the 1980s and the emergence of specialized reputation rankings for industries, products/services, and performance dimensions and for regions. Such rankings resulted in competition between organizations and the alignment of organizational activities to qualify and improve standings in the rankings. In addition, today's changing stakeholder expectations, the growth of advocacy, demand for more disclosures and greater transparency, and globalized, mediatized environments create new challenges, pitfalls, and opportunities for organizations. Successfully engaging, dealing with, and working through reputational challenges requires an understanding of options and tools for organizational decision-making and stakeholder engagement.

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This article charts the historical role of the corporation in society from antiquity to the present day. Using a broad temporal and transnational approach, it argues that social purpose has been a defining trait of the corporation since the concept of legal personhood first appeared in antiquity. The direct connection between incorporation and social purpose formally broke in the 19th century, when countries like the United Kingdom and United States introduced general incorporation laws. Yet many corporations continued to act positively on behalf of society on a voluntary basis, but even as they acted against the interests of workers, consumers, and the environment. This article demonstrates that concerns about corporate power have a long history, and that societies over time have designed a variety of legal systems and forms of corporate governance to address these concerns.

“Corporate reputation” is a term that on the face of it hardly needs explanation. Historians have long used it in an unproblematic fashion to refer to the way a firm is perceived by others. Yet as with many such terms, corporate reputation can be theorized or at least formally defined. Scholars in the fields of marketing and organization increasingly are doing both; since the 1980s they have attempted to distinguish reputation from the related constructs of image, identity, status, legitimacy, celebrity, and brand equity. The project is ongoing, and a strong consensus has not yet been reached on how to define corporate reputation. Charles Fombrun, whose definitions have been perhaps the most widely used, suggests the following: “a collective assessment of a company's attractiveness to a specific group of stakeholders relative to a reference group of companies with which the company competes for resources.” Fombrun's definition contains three core ideas: firms have multiple reputations, depending on which stakeholders are being considered; corporate reputation is a comparative construct, because a firm is always judged in relation to something else—in this case, the firm's competitors; and firms' reputations are a source of competitive advantage or disadvantage.Historians, who for valid intellectual reasons rarely attempt the formal definition of terms, have not participated in the theorizing of corporate reputation. Yet the peculiar skills of historians are much needed; for if the study of corporate reputation has underemphasized the role of institutional phenomena such as rules, norms, processes, and structures, it has all but ignored historical context and historical processes.