Social Spaces and Field Boundaries in Reputation Formation: An Introduction

Abstract

This article introduces a symposium on Social Spaces and Field Boundaries in Reputation Formation, which includes four sociological articles. Here, we have provided a general context to the symposium by discussing reputation research and exploring new sociological directions. Despite its importance to understand cooperation in various social contexts (e.g., groups, populations, and organizations), and its centrality in many socially constructed systems of evaluation (e.g., online markets, science, and intellectual professions), reputation is still under-investigated in sociology. At the same time, current reputation research in other disciplines, such as behavioral sciences, evolutionary biology, and management studies, neglects the importance of sociological factors, including the role of contextual features and boundary conditions across various social fields. This symposium aims to tackle these challenges by presenting a selection of articles that focus on the uniqueness of reputation-driven human cooperation, the relationship between social evaluations and governance failures, the gender dimension of reputation, and the role of reputation repair in international politics. We believe that these articles offer a compact overview of the different ways in which social evaluations can contribute to explain social dynamics. By considering different levels of analysis, i.e., micro, meso and macro levels, they can stimulate sociological research and debate on this important topic.

Keywords

• reputation
• cooperation
• organization
• gender
• politics