Reputation Management in Societal Security: A Comparative Study
研究了政府组织如何在国家安全、防洪和食品安全等领域管理声誉，通过比较五个欧洲国家的组织行为，发现任务类型比国家差异更能解释声誉管理策略的变化。
Societal security poses fundamental challenges for the doctrines of accountability and transparency in government. At least some of the national security state’s effectiveness requires a degree of non-transparency, raising questions about legitimacy. This article explores in cross-national and cross-sectoral perspective, how organizations seek to manage their reputation by accounting for their activities. This article contributes in three main ways. First, it highlights how distinct tasks facilitate and constrain certain reputation management strategies. Second, it suggests that these reputational considerations shape the way in which organizations can give account. Third, it considers three domains associated with societal security, namely intelligence, flood defense, and food safety, in five European countries with different state traditions—the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. By using a “web census,” this article investigates cross-sectoral and cross-national variation in the way organizations seek to account for their activities and manage their reputation. This article finds variation across tasks to be more dominant than national variation.