Actors and Strategies of the Bureaucratic Reputation Game

In this chapter I provide a description of what I call the “bureaucratic reputation game”, by defining the incentives of the relevant actors, their likely preferences, their available strategies, and how the playing out of such strategies produces organizational outputs. Such a characterization of the problem allows me to take sides in the debate on the management of the reputation of public organizations with what I hope the reader will consider some useful insights. The main conclusions of this chapter are twofold. First, we should not take for granted that public organizations benefit from having a good reputation. On the contrary, there are good reasons to expect that they, and even more so their political principals, are often “reputation satisficers”, as opposed to maximizers. Second, when desiring to improve the reputation of a public organization, the most straightforward route is to improve the organization itself.