Reputation management: the new face of corporate public relations?

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.