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The study of organizational task for understanding how organizations behave and evolve has been one of the classic topics in organization theory and public administration. Reputation scholarship has appeared as a promising perspective to understand internal and external organizational dynamics. Reputation scholars, too, emphasize the critical importance of task. Despite this recognition, the literature is characterized by a lack of theorization, and large‐scale comparative analyses on how task characteristics are related to reputational dynamics. This study aims to address these concerns, relying on an extensive longitudinal dataset on the media reputation of 40 agencies in two countries to explain organizations' likelihood of attracting reputational threats (both in general and targeting specific reputational dimensions) through different task characteristics. Our main finding is that as agencies perform tasks of a more coercive and authoritative nature (regulatory tasks and, to a lesser extent, redistributive tasks), they are more likely to attract reputational threats (both in general and to all dimensions). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The observation that emotions matter for audiences' evaluations of agencies gives an incentive to these agencies to try to influence audiences' emotions toward them. However, one might also theorize the opposite, arguing that agencies will place emphasis on those activities or that which are hard to assess by the audiences as audiences do not have sound information to base their assessment upon, and hence, agencies can easily counter argue the audiences' assessment. Second, we argue that the BRT literature, when discussing the relevance of an agency's task to its reputation, often actually refers to the agency's mission (see Wilson 1989) and hence does not yet fully acknowledge the conceptual distinction between agency "tasks" and "goals". So, the extent to which audiences can easily observe and assess agency behavior and agency results will indeed matter, although it has to be empirically assessed in what way this process actually works. [Extracted from the article]

This article applies the ideas of the core executive and court politics to Danish coalition and minority governments. It asks two questions. Do these ideas travel beyond their Westminster origins? What are the dilemmas confronting the Danish executive and its court politics? The analysis is based on documentary sources and 22 elite interviews with cabinet ministers and permanent secretaries. It identifies a duopoly of Prime Minister and Minister of Finance as a distinctive variety of court politics. It identifies the key dilemmas confronted by the Danish executive; namely trust, political support and politicization. It concludes that court politics provides unique insights into the workings of Danish government. The article is a contribution to the comparative analysis of the court politics of governing elites. It shows that the focus on court politics is not only useful for majoritarian Westminster systems but also for the analysis of consensual parliamentary democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]