Organizations in the media
Lecture 1: Organisations, corporate reputation and legitimacy
Important:
Differences between public and private sector organisations
Relevance of legitimacy and reputation for organisations
Problems that public sector organisations could encounter when working on their reputation
An organization is:
- A group of people working together to reach a goal
- By using their environment
- They accomplish tasks and use technologies
- They encounter uncertainties
- they need leadership, leaders develop strategies that help to Reach goals
An organization is:
- structures and processes help with coordinating these tasks:
- structures are the relatively stable, observable distributions of work and responsibilities acros the
divisions of organization
- processes are the less directly observable dynamic activities
incentives make individuals work within those structures and processes
Rainey, 2009
Why do we need to know this?
Understand their behavior
Improve their internal and external communication
To understand and improve their interaction with stakeholders and society at large
Differences between organisations
Contingency theory: organisations differ from each other because they have to adapt to different
circumstances
internal: tasks, size, and strategic decisions
external: technological, legal, economical, political, demographical, ecological, cultural developments
including media landscape
Example: Phillips started with only lights, no they don’t do lightning anymore but more hospital etc. Adapted
to new circumstances becauses their lightning wasn’t future proof
Why are media relevant to organisations?
- the organisations environments influences the organization
- media are an autonomous aspect of this environment as well as an intermediate between other parts of the
environment and the organization
- media report in a critical, neutral or favourable way
-they inform other stakeholders (citizens, competitors, political realm, investors etc)
Media effects priming etc
Example: Shell Shell has got a lot of negative media coverage, but has got a good reputation
Differences between organisations:
- Goal
- Ownership
- Financing
- Ownership
- Size
All organisations strive after survival
,Public VS private organisations (Rainey, Backoff, Levine 1976)
1. Grief market exposure do they experience competition? No market exposure for public, loads of
market exposure for private
2. Legal, formal constraints public organisations have more rules
3. Political influences greater diversity and intensity of external informal influences on decisions
4. Coerciveness
5. Breadth of impact
6. Public scrutiny public organisations has got more attention then private
7. Unique public expectations
Ownership public = government, financing = taxes, primary control = politics
Ownership private = entrepreneurs, financing= clients, private = market
Why is this relevant?
Publicness and privateness of an organization can influence the media coverage
Legitimacy (Suchman, Deephouse 2008)
Legitimacy is a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or
appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs and definitions,
dimension, subjects and sources
It means that an organization can be criticized on many levels
An organization can do something that is illegitimate in the eyes of the public, but legimit in the eyes of the
organization (ontgroening studentenverenigingen)
Legitimacy, status and reputation
Status is a socially constructed intersubjectively agreed-upon and accepted ordering or ranking of social actors,
based on the esteem or deference that each actor can claim by virtue …………
social ranking
reputation focused on past and future behavior
Differences (Deephouse & Suchman, 2009)
1. Legitimacy is a dichotomous, non-rival, homogenizing tends to attach to organizations that share a
certain form, and is political (je accepteerd alle universiteiten en richt je niet op 1 die goed is en 1 die
fout is )
2. Status is a categorical, group rival, segregating tends to attach to self-aware groups ans is honoric
(reflects cultural norms)
3. Reputation concerns the link between the past and future behavirour, is continupus, differentiating,
tends to attach to individual actors and is economic,
Legitimacy and its dimensions are analytic concepts, not fully separable empirical phenomena
Reputation
Based on direct experiences (Gotsi & Wilson) and information on organizations and their competitors
(Fombrun & Shanley)
Reputation attributes – Fombrun, Gardberg, Sever 2001 + CARROLL & McCombs 2003
1. Familiarity; do you know the products very well?
2. Creating Value; do you think the product is worth the mony
3. Operational capability; does it work
4. Corporate citizenship: does it care about the communit?
5. Performance: does it make good use of assets?
6. Leadership: is there a CEO with vision?
7. Appeal: is it liked by stakeholders, a nice company to work for?
8. Credibility; is it trustworthy?
, The consequences of a good reputation?
Influence the organizations survival
Organizational stability
Possibility to increase product prices
More profit
Lower organizational costs
Loyal employees
Attracting applicants
Attracting investors and clients
Satisfied client/citizens/stakeholders
Reputation building
To build a bridge between the current and the desired reputation
A. strategy
B.
C.
Is reputation important for public sector organizations?
Measurement is often designed for companies difficult to apply on the public sector
The thinking is that good deeds should speak for themselves (Luoma-aho, 2007)
And: (deephouse & carter, 2009)
‘Force of law’: you cannot choose for the competitor (you are alone)
Growing importance on reputation: more managerial ways of working and political pressure lead to higher
importance of a good reputation
A good reputation protects organizations in times of budget cuts
Politics problem:
public orgainisations are connected to a political, superordinate level
provides the organization with a mission
mission cannot be changed by the organization itself
political processes interfere with how public organisations are run
Problems in public sector
Consistency problem
Appears when demands are conflicting
Charisma problem
Unability to choose followers and environments
Bureaucracy has negative connotations
Difficult to be associated with positive news
Uniqueness problem
What are the differences, how do you stand out as a ministery? You can’t say that you are better bc that
suggest that the others are bad.
Excellence problem
If you want to excel, you need to say that the other are not that good you cannot do that
Reputation in the public sector
important to have consistend public policies and neutral trustworthy behavior create a reserve of consistent
behavior that adds to a reputation of trushworthiness (luoma-aho, 2008)
strive for a neutral reputation instead of a perfect one
Repution in the private sector
strive for a perfect reputation
