Reputation Management in Times of Crisis: How the Police Handled the Norwegian Terrorist Attack in 2011

The literature on reputation has focused mainly on private sector organizations, where the emphasis is on corporate reputation (Barnett and Pollock 2010), but there has also been an increasing focus on reputation in public sector organizations (Carpenter 2002, 2010; Carpenter and Krause 2012; Waeraas, Byrkjefl ot, and Angell 2011; Maor 2010; Maor, Gilad, and Ben-Nun Bloom 2013; Salomonsen 2013). As public organizations have become increasingly preoccupied with their reputations and reputation management, they have adopted various positive values and identities to present themselves to the different stakeholders in the environment (Waeraas and Byrkjefl ot 2012). This phenomenon is not new, however, and has been identifi ed by various social science theorists over a long period of time. It appears in Goffman’s (1959) work on the distinction between front-stage and back-stage in an organization; in Edelman’s (1964) work on the importance of symbols in organizations; in Meyer and Rowan’s (1977) work on myths and institutional environment; in Brunsson’s (1989) theory of doubletalk in organizations; and in research on organizational prescriptions or recipes (Czarniawska and Sevon 1996; Rovik 2002).