What we stand for: Reputation platforms in Scandinavian higher education

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A brand within a brand: an integrated understanding of internal brand management and brand architecture in the public sector

Branding in the public sector is emerging as an interesting area of research, as diverse organisations find themselves using branding principles to promote a consistent, clear brand. However, very little is known how public organisations could, or should, manage their brands. The purpose of this research, therefore, is to explore brand management processes in the public sector, and its implication for brand architecture, from an employee perspective. With a qualitative approach, the study argues that branding is important not only for the organisation, but also for individual departments. Further, unlike branding in the private sector, public organisations may be more concerned with supporting a positive perception and organisational attractiveness rather than a unique and differentiated brand. This may have implications for brand architecture. By allowing individual departments to manage their brand with support from organisational structures that provide alignment and focus, organisations can form a brand architecture that supports a strong organisational brand and employee brand commitment

Understanding Communication of Sustainability Reporting: Application of Symbolic Convergence Theory (SCT)

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the nature of rhetoric and rhetorical strategies that are implicit in the standalone sustainability reporting of the top 24 companies of the Fortune 500 Global. We adopt Bormann’s (Q J Speech 58(4):396–407, 1972) SCT framework to study the rhetorical situation and how corporate sustainability reporting (CSR) messages can be communicated to the audience (public). The SCT concepts in the sustainability reporting’s communication are subject to different types of legitimacy strategies that are used by corporations as a validity and legitimacy claim in the reports. A content analysis has been conducted and structural coding schemes have been developed based on the literature. The schemes are applied to the SCT model which recognizes the symbolic convergent processes of fantasy among communicators in a Society. The study reveals that most of the sample companies communicate fantasy type and rhetorical vision in their corporate sustainability reporting. However, the disclosure or messages are different across locations and other taxonomies of the SCT framework. This study contributes to the current CSR literature about how symbolic or fantasy understandings can be interpreted by the users. It also discusses the persuasion styles that are adopted by the companies for communication purposes. This study is the theoretical extension of the SCT. Researchers may be interested in further investigating other online communication paths, such as human rights reports and director’s reports

The Core Value Compass: visually evaluating the goodness of brands that do good

yesBrands that do good for the society as well as for themselves are motivated by the core values they espouse, which necessitates a better understanding of what qualities a true core value must possess. The inherent tension within brands that do good, between commercial interests to increase competitiveness, and societal interests that are closely linked to the brand’s authenticity, has largely been overlooked. Hence, we develop and demonstrate a relatively easy-to-apply visual tool for evaluating core values based on a set of ‘goodness’ criteria derived from extant theory. The Core Value Compass adopts a paradox-based, evolutionary perspective by incorporating the inherent tensions within true core values, and classifying them according to their temporal orientation. Thus, we contribute towards a better understanding of underlying tensions of core values and provide a practical tool that paves the way for improved, and indeed ethical, corporate branding strategies. Furthermore, we demonstrate the Compass’ application using the case of a public sector brand, which is a quintessential brand that does good. Therefore, we also contribute to the nascent theoretical discourse on public sector branding. This paper therefore adds to the notable attempts to bridge the gap between theory and practice in core values-based corporate branding

Reputation Management in Nordic Universities - Profile and Development over Time.

The times are long gone when universities were closed entities dominated by a selected group of professors. Modern universities cater to a wide variety of stakeholder groups and are hence socially embedded. This makes universities ‘social accountable’: they provide information, project an image of themselves and are connected in different ways to actors in the environment who are important providers of resources, support, commitment, trust and legitimacy. Reputation management is therefore important. We ask what is typical for the reputation management of universities? What are the core symbols and how are different types of symbols balanced? How much do universities focus on their performance record, their moral symbols (openness, trust, caring, etc.) and professional qualities? We set out to answer these questions using a comparative analysis of twenty universities in four Nordic countries. The data consist of a web-census—a systematic analysis of the websites of the universities in question in 2005 and 2015

Building a Sector Reputation: The Strategic Communication of National Higher Education

What characterises strategic communication aimed at building the reputation of an entire public subsector? This is the main question for this study, pursued through content analysis of one-stop web portals for national higher education from the 21 countries listed in the Times Higher Education’s Top 150 Universities ranking. Findings show that strategic communication is formed by national governments to depict their higher education sector as a coherent whole without letting prominent universities “represent” the higher education sector. The tension between similarity and difference that often occurs in public sector reputation-building is handled partly by emphasising similarity concerns in the structure and format of the presentations, and partly by emphasising differentiation concerns in the contents of the presentations. Furthermore, in contrast to previous studies addressing either the reputation management and branding efforts of single institutions, specific public sector entities, or those of nations, this study shows how higher education reputation-building integrates these different levels through strategic communication

Values as fixed and fluid: Negotiating the elasticity of core values. Kap. 11

This chapter explores how managers perform values work by negotiating organisational core values. By using an acute infection crisis in a Norwegian faith-based hospital as a case study, I examine how managers in two departments strategically evoke and interpret the hospital’s core values. The data illustrate how the inherent ambiguity of values is used by actors to their own interests. I analyse the mechanisms that affect this type of values work. I conceptualise the dynamics of values being simultaneously fixed—at an organisational discursive level—and fluid—at an individual managerial level—as value elasticity