The Formation of Organizational Reputation

In this article, we review four decades of research on the formation of organizational reputation. Our review reveals six perspectives that have informed past studies: a game-theoretic, a strategic, a macro-cognitive, a micro-cognitive, a cultural-sociological, and communicative one. We compare and contrast the different assumptions about what reputation is and how it forms that characterize these perspectives, and we discuss the implications of these differences for our theoretical understanding of stability and change, control and contestation, and the micro–macro relationship in the complex process of reputation formation.