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The Concept of Reputation in Business History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2013

Christopher Kobrak
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Abstract

Historical narratives have enriched, and can even do more to enhance, the concept of corporate reputation by deepening our understanding of how reputation changes over time and among different stakeholders. This literature review highlights this theme of reputation for two audiences—business historians and corporate reputation theorists. By showing how different social and political contexts shape expectations for business behavior, historical study can add new dimensions to the study of corporate reputation.

Type
Literature Review
Information
Business History Review , Volume 87 , Issue 4: Corporate Reputation , Winter 2013 , pp. 763 - 786
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2013 

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References

The author wishes to thank Rowena Olegario, Walter Friedman, and Christopher McKenna for lending their considerable editorial skills to this article.

1 Wilkins, Mira, “The Neglected Intangible Asset: The Influence of the Trade Mark on the Rise of the Modern Corporation,” Business History 34 (01 1992): 66–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 As defining “reputation” is a complicated task for social scientists and one for which I have no special qualification, I will simply rely on the Oxford Dictionary's very general definition of “reputation” as “widespread beliefs that someone or something has a particular characteristic.” The focus here will be on perceptions of attributes like consistent firm trustworthiness, effectiveness, and social responsibility, or unfortunately often the lack thereof. In addition to attributes, perception in all its varieties requires many other modifiers, such as with whom it is held, over what time period, and how it has been cultivated or lost. I include among interested parties (i.e., stakeholders) those such as shareholders, debt holders, governments, workers, suppliers and even non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Although historical study cannot settle definitional debates, by providing a broader temporal and geographic database it enriches how we ask and answer questions about what reputation means.

3 Some critiques understandably ask—Are these recent efforts more marketing than sincere attempts to change the values of a business? See Bhattacharya, C. B., “CSR: It's all about Marketing,” Forbes, 20 11 2009Google Scholar for a relatively tame expression of this view. Some critics of business are much harsher.

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6 Some who study political risk prefer the term political uncertainty, because of the view that each situation in which government or public affairs may impair economic values is unique.

7 See Rindova, Violina P.et al., “Being Good or Being Known: An Empirical Examination of the Dimensions, Antecedents, and Consequences of Organizational Reputation,” Academy of Management Journal 48, no. 6 (2005): 1033–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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9 During various periods, such as during the fight against apartheid in South Africa and during and after the National Socialist regime in Germany, stakeholders' perception of a company's “moral worth” was of great concern and politically defined.

10 Grosskopf, Brit and Sarin, Rajiv, “Is Reputation Good or Bad? An Experiment,” American Economic Review 100, no. 5 (2010): 2187–2204CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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17 Salter, Malcolm S., Innovation Corrupted: The Origins and Legacy of Enron's Collapse (Cambridge, Mass., 2008)Google Scholar. Much of this section comes from a review essay by Kobrak, Christopher, Business History Review 83, no. 1 (2009): 173–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Among the more sensationalist accounts I would include Cruver's, BrianAnatomy of Greed: The Unshredded Truth from an Enron Insider (London, 2002)Google Scholar. The best-known account is by McLean, Bethany and Elkind, Peter, The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron (New York, 2003)Google Scholar, which was made into a documentary film in 2005 with the title Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. The book and film contain a lot of useful information and characterizations but associate a lot of individuals and organizations with Enron's failures merely by innuendo.

18 Since publication of Beecher's, Henry K. “The Powerful Placebo,” Journal of American Medical Association 159, no. 7 (1955): 1602–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar, the role of placebos in medical care has been a hotly debated topic. Estimates of their effects for various treatment categories vary widely, but even among those who work in the pharmaceutical industry, which has a vested interest in minimizing the purely psychological impact of drugs highly recommended by physicians and other opinion leaders, the importance of perception is accepted.

19 Kobrak, Christopher, National Cultures and International Competition: The Experience of Schering AG, 1851–1950 (Cambridge, U.K., 2002)Google Scholar. Schering worked closely with a number of distinguished scientists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including two Nobel Prize winners, Adolf Butenandt and Otto Warburg. In contrast, American scientists felt that cooperating with private enterprise would taint their work, an attitudinal divide that held back U.S. companies well into the twentieth century. See Swann, John P., Academic Scientists and the Pharmaceutical Industry: Cooperative Research in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore, 1988)Google Scholar.

20 Quirke, Viviane and Slinn, Judy, “Introduction,” in Perspectives on Twentieth-Century Pharmaceuticals, ed. Quirke, and Slinn, (Bern, 2010), 21Google Scholar. This is an excellent collection of studies and references on a wide range of topics in the history of pharmaceuticals, which involve many ethical and reputational dilemmas.

21 Vagelos, Roy and Galambos's, LouisMedicine, Science, and Merck (New York, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar is a rare but excellent illustration. As part autobiography, part business history, told by the former head of one of America's most important pharmaceutical companies and by a professional historian, it exposes Merck's “warts” and Vagelos's disappointments, but also the company's commitment to social responsibility. Not only does the book detail how seriously the company takes its scientific achievements, in a chapter entitled the “The Moral Corporation,” the authors also outline Merck's contribution to other social responsibilities under Vagelos's watch. The same authors published a second book, using the title of that chapter, outlining how Merck created The Moral Corporation: Merck Experiences (Cambridge, U.K., 2006)Google Scholar. A decade earlier Louis Galambos had collaborated with Jane Eliot Sewell on another book about Merck, but over a longer period focusing on the company's work in vaccines and antitoxins in scientific networks that fostered innovation—Networks of Innovation: Vaccine Development at Merck, Sharpe & Dohme, and Mulford, 1895–1995 (Cambridge, U.K., 1995)Google Scholar. In The Business of Medicine: The Extraordinary History of Glaxo, a Baby Food Producer, which Became One of the World's Most Successful Pharmaceutical Companies (London, 2001)Google Scholar, Edgar Jones stresses the scientific side of the business.

22 Church, Roy, “Trust, Burroughs Wellcome & Co. and the Foundation of a Modern Pharmaceutical Industry in Britain, 1880–1914,” Business History 48, no. 3 (2006): 376–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Liebenau, Jonathan, “Ethical Business: The Formation of the Pharmaceutical Industry in Britain, Germany, and the United States before 1914,” Business History 30, no. 1 (1988): 116–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Liebenau, Jonathan, “Modernizing the Business of Health: Pharmaceuticals in Britain, in Comparison with Germany and the United States, 1890–1940,” Industrial and Corporate Change 22, no. 3 (2013): 807–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Mann, Charles C. and Plummer, Mark L., The Aspirin Wars: Money, Medicine, and One Hundred Years of Rampant Competition (Boston, Mass., 1991)Google Scholar; and Hertzberg, David, Happy Pills in America: from Miltown to Prozac (Baltimore, 2009)Google Scholar.

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26 Weatherall, Miles, In Search of a Cure: A History of Pharmaceutical Discovery (Oxford, 1990)Google Scholar, especially the last chapter, “The Present and the Prospects,” 271–85.

27 Several other works deal with the importance of regulatory reputation but from the standpoint of historical development; see McCraw, Thomas K., Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adams, Louis D. Brandeis, James M. Landis, Alfred E. Kahn (Cambridge, Mass., 1984)Google Scholar.

28 Carpenter, Daniel, Reputation and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA (Princeton, 2010)Google Scholar.

29 Although others had started discussing political risk in the early 1960s, the study of the political interaction between countries and companies owes much to Raymond Vernon. See his In the Hurricane's Eye: The Troubled Prospects of Multinational Enterprises (Cambridge, Mass., 1998)Google Scholar, Storm over the Multinationals: The Real Issues (Cambridge, Mass., 1977)Google Scholar, and “Economic Sovereignty at Bay,” Foreign Affairs 47 (10 1968): 110–122CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Newburry, William, “Waving the Flag: The Influence of Country of Origin on Corporate Reputation,” The Oxford Handbook of Corporate Reputation, ed. Barnett, Michael L. and Pollock, Timothy G. (Oxford, 2012), 253Google Scholar.

31 See Kobrak, Christopher, Hansen, Per, and Kopper, Christopher, “Introduction,” in European Business, Dictatorship, and Political Risk, 1920–1945, ed. Kobrak, Christopher and Hansen, Per (New York, 2004)Google Scholar.

32 Hayes, Peter, Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era (Cambridge, U.K., 1987)Google Scholar. Since the publication of Hayes's study of IG Farben, there have been relatively few books in English on the German chemical industry that develop the theme of corporate reputation, especially the international effects of companies' association with the Third Reich.

33 Wilkins, Mira, The History of Foreign Investment in the United States, 1914–1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 2004)Google Scholar.

34 Kobrak, Christopher and Wüstenhagen, Jana, “International Investment and Nazi Politics: The Cloaking of German Assets Abroad, 1936–1945,” Business History 48, no. 3 (2006): 399–427CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 For a good discussion of the attitudes of many German businessmen after the war, see Wiesen, S. Jonathan, West German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past, 1945–1955 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001)Google Scholar. Wiesen highlights how German companies had to invest in a large public relations campaign in both Germany and the United States.

36 See Wüstenhagen, Jana, “German Pharmaceutical Companies in South America: The Case of Schering AG in Argentina,” in European Business, Dictatorship, and Political Risk, ed. Kobrak, and Hansen, , 81–102Google Scholar. The chapter was part of a larger project on just this issue of German companies reestablishing themselves in the world. Sadly, the project was discontinued.

37 Wengenroth, Ulrich, “The German Chemical Industry after World War II,” 141–67Google Scholar; and Schröter, Harm G., “Competitive Strategies of the World's Largest Chemical Companies, 1970–2000,” 53–81Google Scholar, in The Global Chemical Industry in the Age of the Petrochemical Revolution, ed. Galambos, Louis, Hikino, Takashi, and Zamagni, Vera (Cambridge, U.K., 2007)Google Scholar.

38 Abelshauser, Werner, et al., German Industry and Global Enterprises, BASF: The History of a Company (Cambridge, U.K., 2004)Google Scholar. See also Stokes's, RayDivide and Prosper: The Heirs of IG Farben under Allied Authority (Berkeley, 1988)Google Scholar, for the period just after the war.

39 Kobrak, Christopher, Banking on Global Markets: Deutsche Bank and the United States, 1870 to the Present (Cambridge, U.K., 2008)Google Scholar.

40 Jones, Geoffrey and Lubinski, Christina, “Managing Political Risk in Global Business: Beiersdorf, 1914–1990,” Enterprise & Society 13, no. 1 (2012; first published online 11 10 2011): 85–119Google Scholar.

41 Ludwig, Corinna, “‘It's Ugly, but It Gets You There’: Volkswagen's Advertising Strategy in the United States, 1949–1968,” Conference Paper, Business History Conference 2012, Philadelphia, 29–3103 2012Google Scholar. The paper is part of a larger project on VW and other companies in the United States.

42 See, for example, Hayes's, Peter study of Degussa, From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich (Cambridge, U.K., 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Lindner, Stephan H., Inside IG Farben: Hoechst during the Third Reich (Cambridge, U.K., 2008)Google Scholar, among the best books on the subject in English. About other sectors see Feldman, Gerald, Allianz and the German Insurance Business, 1933–1945 (Cambridge, U.K., 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and James, Harold, The Nazi Dictatorship and the Deutsche Bank (Cambridge, U.K., 2004)Google Scholar. Even American companies found themselves embroiled in legal battles connected with the Nazi Regime and sought out historians to help determine what their actual role was. See, for example, Turner, Henry Ashby Jr., General Motors and the Nazis: The Struggle for Control of Opel, Europe's Biggest Carmaker (New Haven, 2005)Google Scholar.

43 Marrus, Michael R., Some Measure of Justice: The Holocaust Era Restitution Campaign of the 1990s (Madison, Wisc., 2009)Google Scholar.

44 Investment banking, for example, has always relied on reputation in some form, but as technology and regulation have rearranged how it is conducted, so too have they rearranged the role of trust in trading and advising, and how much joint-stock banks should invest in various aspects of their reputations. Morrison, Alan D. and Wilhelm, William J. Jr., Investment Banking: Institutions, Politics, and Law (Oxford, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar devote over one hundred pages to the history of their subject and the changing role of innovation as banks automate many activities and as joint-stock companies do more investment banking. See Kobrak, Christopher, “Family Finance: Value Creation and the Democratization of Cross-border Governance,” Enterprise & Society 10 (03 2009): 38–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which makes a similar point about the role of trust in nineteenth-century international finance and about the extremely important role reputation still plays in private equity today.

45 Morrison, Alan D., “Universal Banking,” in The Oxford Handbook of Banking, ed. Berger, Allen N., Molyneux, Philip, and Wilson, John O. S. (Oxford, 2010), 171–94Google Scholar.

46 Buch, Claudia M. and DeLong, Gayle L., “Banking Globalization: International Consolidation and Mergers in Banking,” The Oxford Handbook of Banking, ed. Berger, , Molyneux, , and Wilson, , 508–30Google Scholar.

47 Berger, Allen N., Molyneux, Philip, and Wilson, John O. S., “Introduction,” The Oxford Handbook of Banking, ed. Molyneux, Berger, and Wilson, , 1–33Google Scholar.

48 “Banks Sued over Mortgage Deals,” Financial Times, 3 09 2011Google Scholar. Although bank behavior during and leading up to the Panic of 2008 sets the stage for what follows, I will omit specific reference to the many books and articles that have tallied the many blemishes to banker reputation since the end of the millennium.

49 Ferguson, Niall, The House of Rothschild, 2 vols. (New York, 1998)Google Scholar.

50 See Chernow, Ron, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance (New York, 1990)Google Scholar; Strouse, Jean, Morgan: American Financier (New York, 1999)Google Scholar; Carosso, Vincent P., The Morgans: Private International Bankers, 1854–1913 (Cambridge, Mass., 1987)Google Scholar.

51 DeLong, J. Bradford, “Did J. P. Morgan's Men Add Value? An Economist's Perspective on Financial Capitalism,” in Inside the Business Enterprise: Historical Perspectives on the Use of Information, ed. Temin, Peter (Chicago, 1991), 205–36Google Scholar, as well as Sabel's, Charles F. “Comments,” 236–49Google Scholar; and Hannah, Leslie, “Pioneering Modern Corporate Governance: A View from London,” Enterprise & Society 8, no. 3 (2007): 642–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 Chernow, Ron, The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; and Ferguson, Niall, High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg (London, 2010)Google Scholar.

53 Chernow, Ron, The Death of the Banker: The Decline and Fall of the Great Financial Dynasties and the Triumph of the Small Investor (New York, 1997)Google Scholar.

54 Cassis, Youssef, City Bankers, 1890–1914 (Cambridge, U.K., 1994), 31Google Scholar.

55 Burk, Kathleen, Morgan Grenfell, 1838–1988: The Biography of a Merchant Bank (Oxford, 1989), 146–56Google Scholar, recounts the banks' involvement in the 1931 banking crisis, for example. Many very conservative institutions got into trouble over German debt. See Roberts, Richard, Schroders: Merchants and Bankers (London, 1992), 246–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Forbes, Neil, Doing Business with the Nazis: Britain's Economic and Financial Relations with Germany, 1931–1939 (London, 2000)Google Scholar, or his shorter essay that brings out the point of reputational risk, “Managing Risk in the Third Reich: British Business with Germany in the 1930s,” in European Business, Dictatorship, and Political Risk, ed. Kobrak, and Hansen, , 194–205Google Scholar. Many banks that are rightly proud of their long tradition of corporate ethics have even witnessed some slips. See Kobrak, Banking on Global Markets.

56 Jones, Geoffrey and Gallagher-Kernstine, Meghan, “Walking on a Tightrope: Maintaining London as a Financial Center,” Harvard Business School case, 4 08 2010Google Scholar, a case study that argues that Britain's long track record in effective international financial management, despite its weakened economic state after World War II, helped the U.K. draw Eurodeposits in the 1950s and 1960s. The case study is based on several longer histories, primarily, Michie, Ranald C., The City of London: Continuity and Change, 1850–1990 (London, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Schenk, Catherine R., “The Origins of the Eurodollar Market in London, 1955–1963,” in The Development of London as a Financial Centre, ed. Michie, Ranald C. (London, 2000), 221–27Google Scholar.

57 Lewis, Michael, Liar's Poker (New York, 1989)Google Scholar, recounts the ambiance of the Salomon trading? oors. Myron Scholes and Robert Merton Jr. won the Nobel Prize in 1997, just one year before the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), for their work on options pricing; most of the people with whom they traded employed their models. Indeed, many of those heading up the options-trading areas in banks had studied with one of them. The rise and fall of LTCM in general is a wonderful example of how reputation can run wild and lead to investor naïveté and risk taking. See Lowenstein, Roger, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management (New York, 2000)Google Scholar.

58 Good and bad reputations are not immutable, and goods ones are generally difficult to restore once tarnished, but American financial history paints a picture of resilience in the face of many reputational lapses. Despite a crisis-prone past, investors have kept coming back to American capital markets, even after the bursting of the housing bubble and the 2008 Panic. See Sylla, Richard, “Reversing Financial Reversals: Government and the Financial System since 1789,” in Government and the American Economy: A New History, ed. Fishback, Price (Chicago, 2007)Google Scholar.

59 Flandreau, Marc, “The Vanishing Banker,” Financial History Review 19, no. 1 (2012): 1–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 See Kobrak, Christopher and Schneider, Andrea, “Varieties of Business History: Subjects and Methods for the Twenty-First Century,” Business History 53, no. 3 (2011): 401–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 In the twentieth century alone, from Ivar Kreuger to Bernie Madoff, “innovative” stars have lit the sky with reputational brilliance, often taking thousands of investors with them as they hurtled to earth. Portnoy, Frank, The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, the Financial Genius behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals (New York, 2009)Google Scholar. In “Private Cops on the Fraud Beat: The Limits of American Business Self-Regulation, 1895–1932,” Business History Review 83, no. 1 (2009): 113–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Edward J. Balleisen describes well the difficulty of relying on business self-regulation and reputation to prevent fraud.

62 See Stern's, Fritz introduction to The Varieties of History (New York, 1956)Google Scholar; and Amatori, Franco, “Business History as History,” Business History 51, no. 2 (2009): 143–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 Muller, Jerry Z., The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought (New York, 2003)Google Scholar; and Schuessler, Jennifer, “A Specter is Haunting University History Departments: The Specter of Capitalism,” New York Times, 6 04 2013Google Scholar.