Corporate Reputation: Image and Identity

Abstract

It is fruitful to consider two complementary perspectives on the concept of corporate reputation and its relationship to success and credibility. The first of these can be said to be a managerial or pragmatic perspective. Its basis is economic rationality and it focuses on traditional notions of corporate success. It is primarily concerned with the qualities imputed to the corporation by its stakeholders and aims at protecting and improving corporate image. This pragmatic perspective on corporate reputation is having an increased effect upon the behavior of business leaders due to the growing expectations of employees, customers, investors, and the media — and is promoted and marketed by eager hordes of consultants and PR experts. The second perspective can be said to be a reflective perspective. It is existential or philosophical in nature and, in comparison with the pragmatic perspective, employs a broader repertoire of measures of corporate success and focuses on organizational identity rather than image. It is reflective rather than communicative in nature and is more concerned with the inherent ‘character’ of the organization rather than its outward appearance. This perspective does not receive nearly as much conscious leadership attention as the pragmatic perspective. Nevertheless, its focus on ‘what is’ and ‘what should be’ — rather than on ‘what appears to be’ — is rapidly becoming central to the theory and practice of leadership. This is evident in the increasing interest in such concepts as corporate social responsibility, corporate citizenship, and values-based leadership. This paper concludes that supplementing the primarily ‘external’ image orientation of the pragmatic perspective with the ‘internal’ identity perspective of the reflective perspective can lead to increased corporate self-awareness, to an improved capability for reflecting on corporate identity, and to more realistic methods for measuring, evaluating, and reporting on the organization's impact on its stakeholders and society as a whole — in other words, to an improved and more inclusive depiction of the enterprise and its performance which will be necessary for organizational viability and success.