Topic: Organisations in the media
Lecture 1: Organisations and corporate reputation 6 Januari 2020
An organisation is:
• A group of people working together to reach a goal
o Making profit; Public goal; Minor goal
• By using their environment
o Employ your environment to reach goals
• They accomplish tasks and use technologies
• They encounter uncertainties
• They need leadership: leaders develop strategies that help to reach goals; symbolic
power; make sure goals are reached.
Rainey, 2009
An organisation is:
• Structures and processes help with coordinating these tasks:
o Structures are relatively stable, observable distributions of work and
responsibilities across the divisions of organization (formal; how everything’s
arranged)
o Processes are the less directly observable dynamic activities
Why do people do this?
à Motivations for making money; contributing to the greater good.
à Incentives make (groups of) individuals work within those structures and processes
Interplay: determines the success of the organization in the end.
Differences between organisations
• Contingency theory - organisations are different because of contingency; they have to
adapt to circumstances
o Internal: tasks, size and strategic decisions
o External: technological, legal, economical, political, demographical, ecological and
cultural developments
o Including the media landscape
• Goals; Ownership; Financing; Size etc.
o In common: survival
§ Example: Philips has a different goal than when they started, but still exist
Why are media relevant to organisations?
For every organisation the media plays an important role: the media reports about the
organisation and the media inform members of the organisation.
• The organisation’s environments influences the organisation
• Media are an autonomous aspect of this environment, as well as an intermediate
between other parts of the environment and the organisation
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,Media in the organizational environment
à Important for survival
• Media report in a critical, neutral or favourable way
• They (thus) inform stakeholders such as citizens/clients, competitors, the political realm,
investors etc.
• They also can lead to organizational anticipation: the possibility of coverage is taken into
account for decision-making
o If you know that you will be covered in the news, you will probably do something
else than what you otherwise would have done (especially in politics)
Relation between media and organizational reputation
Example Boeing:
• How to deal with the issue
o Restore reputation is very difficult
o How to restore the faith of people
• The interaction of communication plans with the media can give unintended effects; You
won’t really know what and if strategy worked.
Reputation and legitimacy
Legitimacy = a perception that everyone has of a specific actor or organisation; desirable or
appropriate within some socially constructed of norms, values, beliefs and definitions.
• All of this determines whether we find something legitimate or not.
• Contested companies: tobaccy industry; airlines.
o Airlines: getting people to new places vs. bad for the environment
• Illegitimate à Get a communication professional
Reputation (more economic; functional concept) =
• How a firm will perform in the future based on collective perceptions of past behavior or
performance (Deephouse & Suchman, 2008)
• In the eye of the beholder of specific stakeholder or target group; Embedded in a network
of multiple audiences à Multiple reputations attributed to what those groups find
important (Carpenter, 2010)
à Have a good reputation on all dimensions.
Differences
• Legitimacy is dichotomous (you’re legitimate or not), non-rival (if you’re legitimate, doesn’t
mean others are not), homogenizing (if one type of a certain producer is legitimate, other
similar types are also legitimate; judged among same standards), tends to attach to
organizations that share a certain form, and is political (related to norms we have).
• Reputation concerns the link between past and future behavior, is continuous,
differentiating, tends to attach to individual actors, and is economic. Is performance
focused.
• BUT legitimacy and its dimensions are analytic concepts, not fully separable empirical
phenomena.
How can we make a difference between reputation and legitimacy in the media?
Not really; It’s difficult to fully separate the two in practice; unlimited concept (study everything);
use it as a means to study types of organisations.
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,Reputation
The public constructs a reputation based on direct experiences and information on organizations
and their competitors (Gotsi & Wilson, 2001); Sum of attributes.
Carroll & McCoombs, 2003
Most important attributes of reputations:
Consequences of a favorable reputation
Influence the organization’s survival; Organizational stability; Possibility to increase product
prices; More profit; Lower organizational costs; Loyal employees; Attracting applicants; Attracting
investors and clients; Satisfied clients/citizens/stakeholders
So what about the media?
• Stakeholders construct reputation on the basis of information
Media are important to organizations as they can help to interact
• with stakeholders
“We found that stakeholders depend more on the news media to
learn about reputation dimensions that are difficult to directly experience or observe and for
which the news media are the main source of information.”
Jonkman et al., 2019*
The effects of media visibility and tone of coverage
Rooted in agenda-setting theory
The analyses show that:
• Mere exposure to corporations negatively affects reputation
• Whereas tone has a positive effect on reputation
• The effect of negative news is three times larger than the effect of positive news
• Finally, in accordance with research on buffering effects of corporate reputation, we
demonstrate that negative news is less influential for people holding more positive
existing reputational attitudes”
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, Etter, Ravasi & Colleoni, 2019*
Reputation and social media
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