Conversation That Matter. Measuring Corporate Reputation through a Stakeholder Network Perspective

Reputation is one of the most measured multidimensional constructs, considered the impact it can have on organizations’ performance, including the financial one. Reputation as a construct of stakeholders’ attitudes towards organizations and their sensemaking is highly affected by stakeholder-to-stakeholder conversations. In this paper we claim that current corporate reputation measurement models do not take enough into consideration the relational as well as the conversational attributes that stakeholders possess when assessing corporate reputation. Specifically, we argue for the inclusion of a new variable ‘conversations’ and its ‘loci’ of occurrence, i.e. ‘conversational networks’, into existing corporate reputation measurement models. In view of that we propose a theoretical approach that, drawing from social network theories and stakeholder theories, can be fruitful in helping organizations to assess their reputation in both offline and online environments. This approach adopts a conversational perspective.