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INTRODUCTION
Reputation has emerged as an important concept to both researchers and practitioners alike (Fombrun, 1996; Whetten and Godfrey, 1998). Defined as the emotional reaction of external stakeholders to an organization (Fombrun and Shanley, 1990; Fombrun and van Riel, 1997; Whetten, 1997) as well as knowledge they hold about the organization's true characteristics (Fombrun, 1996), reputation taps into what outsiders think and feel about the organization. Fombrun (1996: 72) defines reputation as 'a perceptual representation of a company's past actions and future prospects that describe the firm's overall appeal to all its key constituents when compared to other leading rivals'. Reputation has similarly been expressed as the jointly held belief about the underlying characteristics of an actor (Weigelt and Camerer, 1988; Rao, 1994). Roberts and Dowling (2002) expand upon these definitions to indicate that reputation manifests itself as the extent to which the firm is seen as 'good' and not 'bad'. Reputation includes not only perceptions about past actions, but also future prospects of the organization (Roberts and Dowling, 2002).
Although there is a reasonable consensus about a conceptualization of reputation, there is less agreement about how to measure the concept. For example, while the Roberts and Dowling (2002) manifestation of reputation as the degree to which firms are seen as 'good' or 'bad' is compelling and passes the test of reasonability, it does not suggest which measures might follow. The lack of clarity in defining reputation creates a great deal of challenge to measuring reputation and thus limits our ability to test theories of reputation building and exploiting.
One longstanding, widely available, yet controversial, measure of reputation is Fortune Magazine's annual 'America's Most Admired Companies' survey. Since 1983, the results of the rankings have been published each February as a Fortune cover story that is greeted with a great deal of interest by the business community. However, the response from academics to these rating's usefulness for studying reputation has been somewhat mixed. Despite considerable reliance on the data in studies about reputation, some researchers argue that the Fortune rankings are heavily influenced by previous financial performance. For instance, Brown and Perry (1994), using data from the 1991 survey, conclude that 55 percent of the variance in the overall ratings can be explained by...