Corporate Reputation and Regulation in Historical Perspective

This article reviews the four areas where a significant or growing body of historical works exist: reputation mechanisms and self-regulation, the reputation of the corporate form, the reputation of regulatory bodies, and reputational capital within markets and hierarchies. Reputation mechanisms are an integral part of the phenomenon referred to as private ordering. The state increasingly replaced the regulatory power of reputation by acting out industry regulations to control corporations. Technology and regulation decreased the role of reputation in finance and confined it to the private guarantee of only a few small intermediaries. The shortcomings of the historical literature on corporate reputation are addressed. Reputation intermediaries and corporations' multiple reputations with different groups hold the promise of developing exciting new research in the history of corporate reputation.