Corporate Involvement in Community Affairs*

An extensive monitoring of the Jones and Laughlin (J&L) steel mill in Hennepin, Illinois suggests that absentee-owned corporations have the ability to involve themselves in local community affairs while maintaining an illusion of non-involvement. Three techniques J&L employed to exert influence are described: unilateral actions, cooptation, and intervention. The failure of reputational leadership data to identify corporate influentials is used to suggest both the success J&L had in concealing corporate influence and the inadequacy of the reputational technique for fully identifying power structures in verticalized communities.     

The Influence of Community Disadvantage and Masculinity Ideology on Number of Sexual Partners: A Prospective Analysis of Young Adult,Rural Black Men

Young, rural Black men are disproportionately affected by sexually transmitted infections (STIs), a consequence, in part, of multiple sexual partnerships. We conducted a prospective study that examined the influence of masculinity ideology on changes in numbers of sexual partners in this population. We focused on a set of high-risk attitudes termed reputational masculinity. Community disadvantage during young adulthood was examined as a risk factor for reputational masculinity ideology, and vocational commitment was examined as a potential protective factor. The sample included 505 African American men ages 19 to 22 from high-poverty rural communities. Men reported their numbers of sexual partners during the past three months, masculinity ideology, community disadvantage, and vocational commitment. Follow-up data were collected 18 months after baseline assessment. Negative binomial modeling was used to test study hypotheses. Results indicated that community disadvantage was associated with increases in reputational masculinity during early adulthood, which in turn were linked to increases in numbers of sexual partners. Vocational commitment interacted with reputational masculinity to forecast numbers of sexual partners, attenuating the influence of reputational masculinity. Reputational masculinity and promotion of engagement with the workplace may be important targets for interventions designed to reduce sexual risk behavior.     

Popularity breeds contempt: The evolution of reputational dislike relations and friendships in high school

In this study, we examined the dynamics of the perception of “dislike” ties (reputational dislike) among adolescents within the contexts of friendship, perceived popularity, substance use, and Facebook use. Survey data were collected from a longitudinal sample of 238 adolescents from the 11th and 12th grades in one California high school. We estimated stochastic actor-based network dynamic models, using reports of reputational dislike, friendships, and perceived popularity, to identify factors associated with the maintenance and generation reputational dislike ties. The results showed that high-status adolescents and more frequent Facebook users tended to become perceived as or stay disliked by their peers over time. There was a tendency for friendships to promote the creation and maintenance of reputational disliking but not vice versa. Adolescents tended to perceive others as disliked when their friends also perceived them as disliked. There was no evidence that either cigarette smoking or drinking alcohol affected reputational dislike dynamics. This study highlights the important role that the hierarchical peer system, online peer context, and friendships play in driving information diffusion of negative peer relations among adolescents.     

Organizational Reputation and the Securities and Exchange Commission's Failed Regulatory Revolution

When do regulatory innovations fail? I provide a novel organizations‐based answer to this question by developing an institutional‐reputational approach to regulatory politics. Regulators cannot hope to monitor the vast majority of market activities, so they must rely on the regulated to condition their behavior on the regulator's reputation: beliefs and expectations concerning the regulator's goals and capabilities. Regulators thus pursue daily activities while being mindful of how these activities will shape their reputation and thus their ability to achieve future goals. However, even long‐standing reputations are rendered fragile when rival actors use the organization's reputation to cross‐purposes. Thus, while reputation represents a major source of power, reputation also proves fragile when organizations face conflicting reputational demands. The fragility of reputations provides a novel explanation of an understudied phenomenon: failed regulatory revolutions. I develop this theory through the analysis of innovative Securities and Exchange Commission activity in disclosure law following the Watergate investigation.     

A SIMPLE PRINCIPAL-AGENT EXPERIMENT FOR THE CLASSROOM

In this note we describe a simple, flexible and instructive moral hazard experiment. It can be used in a variety of classes, including principles classes, to illustrate the basic incentive conflicts in principal-agent interactions, the importance of information, and the power of reputational enforcement.     

Locating the Community Field: A Study of Interorganizational Network Structure and Capacity for Community Action*

Abstract I examine the concept of the community field to identify the structures, elements, and processes that generate improved capacity for community action. I conduct analysis of interlocking leadership among local organizations and recent community action in three Midwestern communities to determine the structure and attributes of the community field. I use findings from community power research to anticipate and guide interpretation of the different network structures found in each community. A community field is identified in the communities with pyramidal and coalitional structures. Inclusive, coordinating networks, institutions with stockpiled resources, and the existence of local planning processes are some of the community field‐like structures and processes I identify. The findings have implications for future rural community research and practice, including support for increased use of network analysis as a diagnostic tool for community development.     

Mapping semantic meaning of corporate reputation in global economic crisis context: A Slovenian study

This paper raises fundamental questions about the meaning of reputation and its measurement. It also considers the context of the recent global economic crisis, which brought about the lowest levels of trust in corporations, and a serious erosion of reputational capital of the corporations previously regarded as highly reputable. It maps out the semantic content of corporate reputation in an attempt to capture the ideas that individuals associate with this concept and to contrast it with the established standard reputational measures of reputation. The empirical part is based on semantic network analysis, a special form of social network analysis, where connections are formed by the use of overlapping concepts. The results show that there are a few strong determinants of reputation. They mainly coincide with the established reputational measures; however, some strong determinates seem to be context-specific and reflect the current global economic and financial crisis. The findings of the study correspond to the proposition in the literature that reputation is socially constructed and deliver insights into the relevance of standard and universal reputational measures.     

The Search for Community Leaders: A Re-examination of the Reputational Technique*

A method similar to Bonjean's modification of the traditional reputational approach was applied to a study of two small communities within a Southern state. The relative absence of concealed and symbolic leaders suggests that leader visibility is a variable which varies systematically from community to community. Several community characteristics are posited as explanatory variables determining leader visibility.     

Sect,Church, and Organizational Change

Abstract

Advances in research on national and local influence structures suggest that comparative study of the relationships among the influential in the context of the centralization of power and decision-making is both possible and fruitful. Techniques based on graph theory may be used to operationalize the concept of centralization. We applied Nieminen's (1973) index of centrality to a sample of the elite of the Valle region of Columbia.

Positional, reputational and decisional methods were combined to select the sample, and relationships among respondents in a regionally active core of the elite were mapped from the organizational affiliations they had in common. The adjacency matrix produced by these data showed that direct links among the leaders were structured by organizational brokers in several of the seven cities in the region. The derivative distance matrix and index of centrality incorporate the indirect relationships that exist. All but one person in the sector are closely interrelated in a network, or one clique. An individual's centrality to the network appears to be associated with indicators of status rather than class, but the possibility that differences within this sector of the elite may arise from the interplay of class and status in an industrializing society disappears when the effects of the one deviant case are removed. Reinforced by this finding, we conclude instead that this subset of the elite forms a group of people likely to be in the kind of contact and communication with one another from which consensus emerges. Centrality to a network therefore becomes an indicator of centralization.     

Arbiters,Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of Business School Reputations1

How are organizational reputations established? Expanding on recent work that emphasizes the construction of reputations rather than their cultural content, we explore how forces in the organizational environment define organizational reputation. Specifically, we demonstrate how two types of mediators—reputational arbiters and reputational entrepreneurs—influence the development of reputations by organizing and managing the information on which reputations are built. Buttressing our theoretical claims with 30 interviews of business school administrators, we find that these mediators play a central role in determining organizational reputations by engaging in three processes of information manipulation: synthesis, selection, and simplification. In addition to specifying the key role that the manipulation of information by outsiders plays in the development of reputation, this approach suggests the importance of the interrelationships among these mediators in the determination of reputational standing.     

Reputational cues in repeated trust games

The importance of reputation in human societies is highlighted both by theoretical models and empirical studies. In this paper, we have extended the scope of previous experimental studies based on trust games by creating treatments where players can rate their opponents’ behavior and know their past ratings. Our results showed that being rated by other players and letting this rating be known are factors that increase cooperation levels even when rational reputational investment motives are ruled out. More generally, subjects tended to respond to reputational opportunities even when this was neither rational nor explainable by reciprocity.     

One-shot exchange networks and the shadow of the future

From the Prisoner's Dilemma and other games, it is well known that strategy selection in one-shot games can be very different from that in iterated games. Because exchange structures were studied only as iterated games, whether one-shot structures differ was not known. Nor have exchange theories previously considered whether events in structures would be different if studied as one-shot games. This paper offers new theory to predict one-shot exchange structures and one-shot experiments to test that theory. As predicted, the experiments found that processes and outcomes of one-shot exchange structures are quite different from those of iterated exchange structures. For example, certain relations that are strategically used as threats in iterated exchange structures occur very rarely in one-shot structures. It follows that power differences in one-shot structures regress from those observed for repeated structures.     

Research note: reflections on interviewing across the ethnic divide

Studying policy networks raises challenges in three important areas: identifying members of the policy network, gaining access to the network, and reporting findings from the study while maintaining confidentiality. Using the tobacco control policy and health policy networks in Victoria, Australia as a case study, the article describes how to use a reputational snowball to identify a policy network. I argue that the reputational snowball not only presents a useful tool for identifying micro‐level network members, but also provides a means for assessing which members of the policy network are core, and which ones are on the periphery. Issues around reporting in studies of policy influentials are also discussed.     

Alphabet Economics: The link between names and reputation

In economics, most coauthored papers have all coauthors in alphabetical order. It is sometimes argued that this conveys advantages to people whose names start with letters that come early in the alphabet. This paper examines whether the alphabetical ranking of names affects someone's reputation. Overall, we find that faculty members with earlier last name initials are more likely to get employment at high standard research departments. Furthermore, we show that the relationship between alphabetical placement and academic success remains significant if we use as an alternative measure of reputation the number of people showing an interest in the papers of a particular academic. This paper also investigates whether the reported alphabetical effect creates differential incentives for coauthoring. It is found that the reputational advantage of first-authorship motivates people to manipulate their names so as to obtain a more beneficial alphabetical position within the majority of articles.     

The Identification of Leadership in Two Texas Communities: A Replication of the Bonjean Technique

The Bonjean reputational technique of identifying community leaders is employed in two small Texas communities differing vastly in demographic and economic characteristics. The rankings of leaders revealed a highly visible power structure in both communities with few concealed leaders (those ranked higher by key influentials than by lower-ranking influentials) and few symbolic leaders (the opposite ranking pattern). High visibility in vastly dissimilar towns is discussed in terms of (low) magni-complexity (Bonjean) and preponderantly horizontal linkages (Warren) found in small communities; this suggests that the Bonjean technique is a more valuable instrument in larger communities.     

A Mathematical Approach to Categorization and Labeling of Qualitative Data: the Latent Categorization Method

As text databases increasingly become available to researchers, the limits to human cognition are rapidly reached. Focusing on examining objective realities, this paper introduces the latent categorization method, a novel new research method for analysis of large and midsize data sets. This method clusters text artifacts and extracts the words that were most important in creating the clusters. Further, it demonstrates a set of techniques for extracting knowledge from a representative data set involving 6135 abstracts from a variety of business‐related journals .     

REPUTATIONAL COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE AND MULTINATIONAL ENTERPRISE

For a firm without a readily identifiable brand name, quality reputation may solely reflect the country of origin. In this article I endogenize these country-of-origin reputations and show that these self-fulfilling reputations determine not only the average quality of a country's exports but also the type of products in which a country specializes. Hence, the pattern of international trade can be determined by reputational comparative advantage. This specialization can also establish the location of the host and the parent firm in a multinational enterprise. Furthermore, this reputation effect can identify whether internalization or licensing is more likely to occur.     

Nepali Tendrils in the Work of Naoki Ueno

ABSTRACT

The interplay among artifacts, agencies, organizations, and individuals has been a theme in the work of Naoki Ueno and his colleagues. Examples from Ueno’s work in Nepal and Japan characterize this interplay, and reveal contrasting outcomes regarding the reification of artifacts. Features of the political and social contexts in which these interactions play out impact whether and how reification (or on some occasions de-reification) of artifacts can occur.     

A Study of Reputational Community Leaders Using The Concepts of Exchange and Coordinative Positions*

The general purposes of this study were to investigate the group and organizational affiliates of reputed community leaders in a rural community. The specific hypotheses were that the higher one is ranked as a reputational leader, (1) the more exchange influence he will likely have accumulated through occupying economic, kinship, occupational, ownership, and political-governmental positions which are reputedly influential in the community, (2) the more likely he is to be an active participant in formal and/or informal coordinative interstitial groups in the community, and (3) the more likely he is to be an active participant in those formal coordinative groups which are reputed to be influential over community affairs. The hypotheses were tested by comparing the sets of rankings of twenty-eight reputational leaders with (1) their rankings in terms of exchange positions scores, (2) their rankings in terms of social participation scores, and (3) their rankings in terms of weighted social participation scores. The results of the study tended to support the hypotheses, as stated, for the community involved.     

Social support and reputational defense strategies of Chinese social networking site users in Sun Yang’s controversy

This study examines the online expression of Chinese social networking site (SNS) users in a human brand crisis. Using the case of Sun Yang’s doping allegations controversy, the research employed content analysis to examine how Chinese users rendered social support and acted as surrogate crisis responders for Sun in a collectivist Chinese culture. The results indicate that (1) Sun’s supporters were most likely to display emotional support, and this pattern continued over time, (2) Chinese SNS users were inclined to implement the reputational defense strategies of attacking the accuser, denial, and reminding in response to their hero’s case, and (3) the prevalence of the three defense strategies varied over time. Theoretical and managerial implications are provided regarding how parasocial relationship with the accused human brand and in-group/out-group differentiation affect SNS users’ online expressions of social support and reputational defense in the Chinese culture.