Reputation
The reputation or prestige of a social entity (a person, a social group, an organization, or a place) is an opinion about that entity – typically developed as a result of social evaluation on a set of criteria, such as behavior or performance.[1]
For the album by Taylor Swift, see Reputation (album). For other uses, see Reputation (disambiguation).
Reputation is a ubiquitous, spontaneous, and highly efficient mechanism of social control.[2] It is a subject of study in social, management,[3] and technological sciences.[4] Its influence ranges from competitive settings, like markets, to cooperative ones, like firms, organizations, institutions and communities. Furthermore, reputation acts on different levels of agency: individual and supra-individual. At the supra-individual level, it concerns groups, communities, collectives and abstract social entities (such as firms, corporations, organizations, countries, cultures and even civilizations). It affects phenomena of different scales, from everyday life[5] to relationships between nations. Reputation is a fundamental instrument of social order, based upon distributed, spontaneous social control.
The concept of reputation is considered important[6] in business, politics, education, online communities, and many other fields, and it may be considered as a reflection of a social entity's identity.