ABSTRACT

Corporate reputation is a firm’s unique property that has been established and experienced by insiders and evaluated by outsiders over time (Fombrun, 1996; Podolny, 1993). Abundant research in economics and management has shown that while reputation is intangible it is of great value to the firm and firms are required to pay close attention to the successful building and management of their reputations. Working from the premise that a good reputation is an asset, 2 there are also an increasing number of studies that analyze the impact of a damaged reputation on a firm and steps a firm could take to repair the damage (Dukerich and Carter, 2000; Rhee and Haunschild, 2006; Rhee and Valdez, 2009). In particular, the difficulty of repairing reputational damage can greatly differ depending on various contextual factors. The goal of this chapter is to create a greater understanding of how those factors impact the heterogeneity of this difficulty.