Digital Transformation in Corporate Reputation

This chapter described the development of corporate reputation into e-reputation against the background of a global digital transformation as part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, based on the theories of legitimacy and signalling. The importance of corporate reputation in the long-term sustainability and success of organisations was illustrated, and the effects of digital transformation on reputation management were highlighted. The chapter proposed that organisations should be more proactive in managing their e-reputation in a digitally transformed environment. Specifically, it was proposed that e-reputation be perceived in three important new ways, namely what forms e-reputation, how it is formed, and who forms e-reputation. Firstly, in the digital age, it was proposed that corporate reputation is becoming increasingly impersonal. This is a significant trend that implies that practitioners and researchers should realise that the reputational landscape is a multifaceted field with various potential challenges. Secondly, how e-reputation is formed must be perceived in a new way that moves from the traditional paradigm of reputation development, which relies on perceptions of past and expected future interactions between organisations and their stakeholders, to the inclusion of digitally transformed systems. For practitioners and researchers to be able to manage and understand corporate reputation, they must redefine the dimensions, components, and items of corporate reputation within a unique digitally transformed organisational context. Finally, a shift in who forms an e-reputation was also proposed, to include other entities. Stakeholders and organisations, as well as corporate reputation practitioners and researchers, rely on a digitally transformed system of designers, information providers, and data holders who underpin digital interactions and information from which reputations are formed.