The Handbook of Public Sector Communication

14Public Sector Organizations and Reputation

Jan Boon and Heidi Houlberg Salomonsen

Introduction

That reputation may serve public organizations as an intangible asset has increasingly been recognized in recent years by public managers and academic scholars alike. Contemporary public organizations operate in environments, which for a number of reasons makes reputation relevant. First, public organizations often face environments characterized by the ubiquity of crisis and blame games mediated by traditional news and social media (Boin, ‘t Hart, Stern, & Sundelius, 2017; Hood, 2011; Luoma‐aho, 2007; Chapter 15 in this book). This further generating quests for accountability by the media, politicians, citizens, etc., which further increases public organizations’ concerns with reputational risk. For example, public organizations have been found to be more concerned with avoiding bad publicity (or reputational threats) than with promoting good publicity (Schillemans, 2012). Second, due to the increase in performance management, stakeholders increasingly receive information on the performance of public organizations. Such information enables the assessment of individual public organizations relative to other organizations performing the same task (e.g. producing the same time of service), as well as relative to the past performance of the organization (see Chapter 12), with potential reputational consequences. Third, central stakeholders of public sector organizations (e.g., professional ...