Corporate Reputation Management and Communicative Capitalism: A Love Story

• In Event: Critical Interventions in Corporate Communications

Abstract

Figured as an ‘intangible asset’ on balance sheets, a well-managed corporate reputation enables companies to avoid state regulatory control, strengthen client trust, retain employees, facilitate outsourcing, and shape issues of public interest to their own agenda. In the wake of the “proliferation, distribution, acceleration and intensification of communicative access and opportunity” (Dean, 2009, 17), intangible corporate assets now account for 80% of the average value of publicly traded companies in the United States (Juetten, 2014). Clearly, practices of corporate reputation management lie at the heart of communicative capitalism and its perennially crisis-ridden regimes of accumulation and modes of governmentality. This paper will trace the parameters of this relationship by examining the ways practices of corporate reputation management are being generalized across the population at large and are linked to broader processes of securitization, surveillance, identity management and control.

Dean, J. (2009) Democracy and other neoliberal fantasies: Communicative capitalism and left politics. Durham: Duke University Press.

Juetten, M. (2014) ‘Pay Attention to Innovation and Intangibles’, Forbes, Oct. 2.

Author

• Alison Hearn, University of Western Ontario