The Formation of Legitimacy and Reputation in the Digital Society

Social media have fundamentally changed how evaluative judgments about organizations are produced and disseminated in the public domain. In this session we discuss how these changes question traditional assumptions about the constitution and effects of corporate reputation, and we explore new alternative frameworks that account for the more active role of organizational audiences, the changing ways in which they express their evaluations, and the increasing heterogeneity and dynamism that characterizes reputation in the digital age.

Speaker

Jesper Falkheimer (Ph.D.) is Professor at the Department of Strategic Communication, Lund University, Sweden, and Professor II at Kristiana University College, Oslo, Norway. His research interests are strategic communication in general, and more specific, crisis communication, public relations, communication management, terrorism and place branding. Since several years he has combined research with university management positions and is now Executive Director for Division for Research, Collaboration and Innovation at Lund University, after six years as Rector for Campus Helsingborg. He is Editor-in-Chief for Journal of Communication Management, Honorary Fellow at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and an executive board member of one of the major communication agencies in Sweden. He is the author and co-author of over 115 publications. He is co-editor (main editors Robert Heath and Winni Johansen) for International Encyclopedia of Strategic Communication (2018, Wiley), and recently published the textbook Strategic Communication: an Introduction (with M. Heide, Routledge).