Strategic reputation management : towards company of good /

This impressive but frustrating treatise addresses three sets of readers. One, academic scholars in management and communication, will find it enormously valuable for its breadth and depth. The second, students, are likely to be overwhelmed by its complexity. The third, practitioners, will be frustrated by the academic writing style, which makes it difficult to discern the practical strategies the authors want to convey. Phrases such as "organizational reputation is a latently contested concept" make it tough going. The book is primarily an extensive literature review of modern communication theory, which also draws on organization and management theory. The authors make a valiant attempt to bring the literature to life with examples and case studies, nicely balanced between US and European examples, especially from Finland, the authors' country. The "arena model" posits that reputation is created when an organization and its publics interact in various communication "arenas." In arguing for the originality of their point of view, they occasionally overstate their case. The distinction between the "mechanistic" view of human communication they designate as "communicatio" and the "communicare" view they favor is neither as large nor as clear as they suggest. Summing Up: Recommended. Only comprehensive collections in communication and management supporting researchers and faculty. M. S. Myers Carnegie-Mellon University