ABSTRACT
In chapter 3 we established a tension between two competing discourses over organizational reputation: the financial, value-driven capital discourse and the meaning-driven, interpretive discourse. However, we did not take an ultimate stand—which one is the “right way” to capture reputation and its formation processes? In other words, what do we think is the reputation of the good company? Is it money or stories? Our answer is that, in order to become good, a company has to pay attention to both aspects of reputation. We firmly believe that the tendency of mainstream reputation literature to collapse reputation to an economic view has led to an impoverished understanding of how reputations are built, improved, and destroyed. While we have been critical towards the dominant capital view, we readily acknowledge that a purely interpretive focus on reputation-as-stories, on the other hand, runs the risk of neglecting the fact that, first, reputations have real value to organizations, and, second, that reputation-building is often a competitive activity.
