An empirical study of Fortune 500 companies suggests that "reputation manag
ement" is gaining ground as a driving philosophy behind corporate public re
lations. Whether the phenomenon is a trend or a fad is not clear, given the
lack of consensus in defining reputation, the instability and questionable
validity of reputation measures, and unanswered questions about when and h
ow (or even whether) reputation can be "managed." Besides reputation manage
ment, corporate public relations departments in the study embraced a wide v
ariety of other definitions of their function, suggesting that public relat
ions continues to have great difficulty in defining itself. While the study
did not find a strong correlation between reputation and overall spending
on corporate communication activities, as had a similar study the prior yea
r, it did find some interesting correlations between reputation and specifi
c categories of spending. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserve
d.