Reputational spillovers: Evidence from French architecture

Abstract

While the notion of reputation has attracted much scholarly interest, few studies have addressed the strategic issue of reputational multiplicity and managing the interactions among different types of reputations. We suggest that an organization can have several stakeholder-specific reputations-peer, market, and expertand that reputational spillover effects (the continued influence of one reputation on another) matter at the organizational level. We test reputational spillovers on 42 French architecture companies over a period of 30 years. Our results show that over time, the three reputations interact with each other, generating positive spillovers, with the exception of market and expert reputations. We contribute by explaining how interconnected organizational reputations among different stakeholders can interact over time, how companies can strategically manage reputational spillovers, and how such spillovers influence organizations in creative and professional industries.

Exploring the Links between Reputation and Fame: Evidence from French Contemporary Architecture

“…Drawing on previous studies that consider reputation to have audience-specific forms (Boutinot et al, 2015;Carter & Deephouse, 1999;Dollinger et al, 1997;Mishina et al, 2012), we argue that one kind of audience confers one kind of reputation, and that an organization in creative industries can haveand combinethree reputations: peer, market and expert.…”

“…Previous studies have argued that media coverage provides a window through which to study the reputation-building process (Boutinot et al, 2015;Rindova et al, 2007). Indeed, journalists inform their audiences about the value and effectiveness of firms and their leaders (Pollock & Rindova, 2003).…”

“…Thus, media dedicated to a particular audience (such as professional architectural journals) can reflect what is seen as valuable in that audience's eyes (Carter and Deephouse, 1999). As our archival study made us aware that these articles might not cover all the relevant information, and following previous approaches to reputation (Boutinot et al, 2015;Rindova et al, 2007) and fame (Ferris, 2007;Van de Rijt et al, 2013), we drew on media coverage to develop the variables necessary for understanding how the several kinds of reputation and fame might (or might not) be connected.…”

“…For instance, the Pritzker Prize is awarded by a set of 'recognized professionals in their own fields of architecture, business, education, publishing and culture' (Pritzker Prize website, 2015). We thus used architecture-specific indicators for reputation (Boutinot et al, 2015).…”

The Formation of Organizational Reputation

“…Velamuri, Venkataraman, and Harvey (2017), for instance, document how the establishment of a reputation for ethical behaviour does not only depend on actually engaging in ethical action, but also on the mobilization of the support of a broad range of stakeholders, including the press, civil rights organizations, and the judiciary who publish content on such actions. As a result of such collective processes, reputations tend to reflect broad sets of interactions (Rindova, et al, 2007;den Hond, Rehbein, de Bakker & Hilde Kooijmans-van Lankveld, 2014), including inter-group "spill-overs" (Boutinot, Ansari, Belkhouja & Mangematin, 2015) and are, therefore, not necessarily traceable to specific actions.…”