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Kevin T. Jackson. Building Reputational Capital: Strategies for Integrity and Fair Play that Improve the Bottom Line. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, 227 pages, $30.00 hardcover.
What do you think is a firm's "most valuable" asset: (a) its financial wealth, (b) its people, (c) its overall performance, or (d). . . ? The author, a consultant on business ethics and a professor of legal and ethical studies at Fordham University's Schools of Business in New York City, would unhesitatingly check the fourth option. You cannot see what it is because the asset of reputational capital is intangible. He says this book is about showing firms how to increase this capital and by so doing "unleash extraordinary benefits to the bottom line." I personally would pick another of the options. Moreover, if you ask me, this book is also very much about impression management. I will, at the end, tell you what my pick is, explain my view of the book's subject, and borrowing a bit from the title of another book on the same subject (Alsop, 2004), will give you my own "immutable law of corporate reputation."
The book's first part addresses the various nuances of the subject, speculates on why reputational capital is the most valuable asset, and proposes a way to measure it. This part seems a bit overdrawn, due somewhat I suppose, to the nature of the subject. Intangibles, unlike tangibles, cannot be described succinctly. Just think of all the intangibles and the voluminous literature about them in the field of psychology.
The author defines reputational capital as "a firm's intangible long-term strategic assets calculated to generate profits." This rather imprecise definition could be referring to a variety of intangibles. Two related ones that may occur to you are those of image and identity. They also occurred to the author, and he advises us not to "mistake" them with reputation. It is easy to do, and his attempt to differentiate them sometimes complicates the effort. For instance, he associates identity and image with the "personality" of a firm and its brands, respectively, and reputation with the firm's "underlying character," and says "image...