Legitimacy and Reputation in the Institutional Field of Food Safety: A Public Relations Case Study

Henrik Merkelsen

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    Abstract

    The overall objective of this study is to examine how the institutional context of food safety affects and is affected by concerns for legitimacy and reputation. The paper employs a neo-institutional approach to analyzing the institutional field of food safety in a case study of a multinational food service provider where a tension between conflicting institutional logics implied a reputational challenge. The study shows how food safety as a well-defined operational risk is transformed into a high-priority reputational risk and how actors in the field of food safety are caught in a state of mutual distrust, partly as a consequence of an intense politicization of food risk over the past years and partly as a result of their respective concerns for legitimacy. The study points to how the field of food safety is colonized by a reputational logic that is paradoxically reproduced by actors at all organizational levels even though they strongly oppose to this logic.
    Original languageEnglish
    JournalPublic Relations Inquiry
    Volume2
    Issue number2
    Pages (from-to)243-265
    ISSN2046-147X
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - May 2013

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