Abstract
Perceptions matter. They surround us as individuals, shaping the way we think about others, whether they be people, organizations or places. The last two decades have seen a dramatic increase in the amount of published reputation scholarship, with valuable contributions from a wide variety of disciplines including psychology, sociology, management economics, finance and law, among others. Each of these seeks to explore how and why reputations have value, and how reputations are created, sustained, destroyed and rebuilt. In this new and valuable book, William S. Harvey explores the ‘phenomenon of reputation’, setting up the stakes with compelling urgency on the opening page where he makes it clear that we ignore reputations at our peril.
Harvey’s focus is on ‘organizations, politicians, governments and individuals’. He starts off by stating that reputation is an intangible currency bringing five principal benefits (pricing power, public recognition, better talent, strategic optionality and the ability to attract investment) or six downsides (indifferent customers, negative assumptions, unwanted attention, demotivated employees, poor performance and being unable to attract investment). His framing immediately highlights the importance of, but also the challenges associated with, such a wide field of study.
This book could explore the value and dynamic properties of reputation in many different settings. The fact that Harvey sets his opening discussion in the challenges to democratic discourse today makes this book timely and fresh. Perhaps most important, it allows him the opportunity to introduce the foundational work of leading sociologists including Mark Granovetter in explaining how and why reputations exist through and between people. I also think that it would have been useful to reference the excellent contemporary paper here by Ron Burt, Sonja Opper, and Håkan J. Holm (2022).
Network structures matter in the study of reputation, something that is often overlooked by scholars in other disciplines where reputation is studied as an asset rather than as a flow. Network scholars have a lot of valuable insights to share when it comes to how reputations are created, maintained, destroyed and rebuilt. After all, perceptions are shared in and between people, making network structures a critical moderator in the reputation game. There is a lot of powerful scholarship in this field, including a paper exploring reputation networks in management consulting by Johannes Glückler and Thomas Armbrüster (2003).
Introducing sociologists is smart, broadening the intellectual frame of the book. Harvey makes clear the important point that our views about others are shaped by the views of others in the networks that surround all of us, all the time. Setting this up in the context of the democratic process unlocks the rich and critically important area of bipartisan ‘closure’ in groups, the ignorant certainty that sometimes follows from that, and the role that our technology giants today have in structurally embedding this problem.
Harvey is a good storyteller. He brings to the pages valuable examples drawn from his own personal work over many years as well as meticulously researched high-profile examples drawn from the public archive. But it is his work on how the different reputations of a ‘place’ informs much of what we do as people that I find particularly novel and interesting.
This is important in a contemporary as well as a structural sense. From a contemporary perspective, Harvey brilliantly analyses how reputation and migration interact. He explores how Indian and Chinese workers have built Silicon Valley as well as how perceptions of place inform the choices made by skilled labour all over the world. This is rich territory, providing powerful analytical simplicity to human capital public policy questions. He hints at the role of reputation in forced migration too, but stops short of explaining how place-based reputations underpin the choices being made by economic and political refugees today. I would have liked to see more on this, given the scale of the problem globally and the impact it has on the lives of so many vulnerable people. Harvey spends less time exploring the structural lens, which would have brought forward the issue of reputations in global labour markets, the public perceptions surrounding the growing gig economy, and the responsibilities of organizations in this vital public policy area. I would have liked to have seen a chapter on this, tied perhaps to the way that regulators and policymakers around the world use reputations as a diagnostic tool as well as a policy instrument in its own right. There are many examples of this, such as the work done on perverse incentives by Zhaohui Chen, Alan D. Morrison, and William J. Wilhelm Jr (2013).
I also really like the way that Harvey brings the reader immediately to the subject of purpose. Too often, purpose is either discussed as a (performative) communications strategy, or as an afterthought. Harvey rightly introduces purpose in Chapters 1, 2 and 3 before devoting an entire chapter to the alignment of purpose and values (Chapter 7). He quickly isolates the central issue which is the reputational damage caused when stated purpose is not aligned to action. This is a critically important insight, and one that too often confounds managers and scholars alike. It builds on the work of many studying purpose in different fields including the Enacting Purpose Initiative, a multi-institution partnership consisting of the University of Oxford, the University of California at Berkeley, Federated Hermes, BCG’s BrightHouse, and the British Academy, which I chair. Scholarship of note in this field, and which link to Harvey’s analysis, include the work done by Clara Barby et al. (2021) on measuring purpose and Bruno Deffains et al.’s (2023) work on purpose governance.
There is a particular focus on reputation within employee groups, perhaps not surprising given Harvey’s deep professional and published expertise in culture and employee engagement. Chapter 9 (doing well by doing good) is dedicated to this theme. This is a source of huge value, as well as risk, for organizations today. What I particularly like about this chapter is the way in which he discusses four seemingly unconnected cases – the UK Police, Australian executive search firms, African tribal leadership and Daoist practices in Chinese firms – to draw out some common themes relating to the role of reputation in employee settings.
For me, this book does well to embed reputation analytically within strategy as an information portal and as a means of stakeholder influence. Peppered throughout the book are interesting examples of reputation as an early warning mechanism, and of its power to influence outcomes. Harvey also devotes time to crisis management responses, including a full chapter on responding to threats. This is excellent – especially the way in which he narrates the McKinsey integrity crisis and the B&J (meat processing) leadership crisis. These examples highlight the strategic complexity involved in managing crises in a way that goes beyond what one might usually read in the media and other public sources.
The chapter on crisis recovery strategies draw from my own work as well as others including an excellent paper by Yuri Mishina, Emily S. Block and Michael J. Mannor (2012) on the differences between capability and character recovery strategies. Harvey adds a useful anchor back to identity which is especially interesting in his analysis of a prison inmate setting. He puts forward intuitively valuable insights, but I think Harvey misses a trick here in exploring the power of desired reputation in such strategies, as well as the role of expectations.
The reader needs to be careful about the way Harvey introduces normative frames into the book. From the outset, the reader is exposed to normative statements around the role of business in society, statements about how migration brings reputation benefits ‘at all levels’, and the stakeholder phenomenon that rightly punctuates much of the book. Harvey, like many others, takes aim at different points in the book at Friedman’s shareholder value theory. While intellectually valid, I cannot help sense that Harvey misses a trick here which is to argue that reputations matter just as much in a shareholder primacy model as it does in a stakeholder value model. I would perhaps also go further to argue that Friedman implicitly recognizes the importance of reputation in his efficient capitalist market theories.
I would have also liked to hear more about how Harvey sees reputation as a means of regulating organizations. The obvious starting point for such analysis would be in the realm of the social media giants, whose role in limiting or undermining democratic discourse Harvey rightly highlights.
These omissions however do not detract from the overall book. Reputations at Stake does a wonderful job of explaining how the study of reputations is valuable in our societies today. Indeed, Harvey’s twelve conclusions are worthy of being a ‘call to arms’ for future research. I particularly liked his ‘balance between engagement and over-promotion’, ‘strategies for overcoming information bias’, ‘strategies for overcoming perceptions of inauthenticity’, ‘aligning organisational purpose and values’ and ‘how reputation can be used to reframe and rebuild after crises’. The fact that we are asking these questions shows just how far the field has evolved since 2000, and the potential for future scholarship.
