Editorial: The reputation community

We are delighted to welcome you to this special (double) issue celebrating the 20th anniversary of our Corporate Reputation Review (CRR)! The birth of the journal is closely tied to the founding of the Reputation Institute (RI) in 1997 by Charles Fombrun and Cees van Riel. The papers included in the inaugural issue were edited versions of presentations made at the first conference RI organized in New York in May 1997. Those papers illustrated the broad scope and relevance of reputation research, and ranged from conceptual reflections on measurement and financial valuation to explorations of the psychological and sociological processes associated with reputation-building; and from corporate marketing to crisis management. The editorial article that introduced the first issue, “The Reputational Landscape,” written by Charles Fombrun and Cees van Riel, quickly became a classic. It pointed to the richness of ‘reputation’ as a field of study—a construct they showed was inherently interdisciplinary and demanded new ways of bridging theories drawn from the fields of strategy, organization, economics, sociology, and psychology. In doing so, that groundbreaking editorial pointed to the need for a new and vibrant collaborative platform for academics from a wide variety of disciplines—and our ‘reputation community’ was born.