Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Reputation, as a social scientific concept, refers to the existence of a socially recognized persona: an organizing principle by which actions of a person (or group, organization, or collectivity) are linked into a common assessment. On one level a reputation constitutes a moral gestalt that is linked to a person – an organizing principle for person perception. However, reputations are more than this social psychological claim: they are collective representations, enacted in relationships. In this, the opinion that one individual might form of another often differs from a shared, established image. Reputations are embedded within social relations, and, as a consequence, reputation is connected to forms of communication, tied to a community. Social identification and reputation operates in several domains: personal, mass-mediated, organizational, and historical. While reputations often begin within circles of personal intimates, they spread outward. First, people create and share the reputations of those who exist within their social circle – friends and consorts. Personal reputations are of immediate consequence, because the actions of those in our social world have the potential to shape our lives and interaction outcomes. People are concerned with the repute in which they are held because of the options that reputations open and close, and because reputations permit us to evaluate ... log in or subscribe to read full text