Hogne Lerøy Sataøen

Branding without Unique Brands: Managing similarity and difference in a public sector context

Abstract Corporate branding requires organizations to focus on uniqueness and differentiation. At the same time, public institutions must provide equal services in order to gain legitimacy. Hence, corporate branding in the public sector organizations has to handle two concerns simultaneously – securing legitimacy and building reputation. We examine this tension through interviews with communication managers in Norwegian hospitals. Despite large investments in techniques borrowed from corporate branding, the informants were reluctant to talk about branding. Instead, they were more oriented towards the universal character of their hospitals. Four explanations are put forward for why branding has an ambiguous position in Norwegian hospitals.

Being All Things to All Customers: Building Reputation in an Institutionalized Field

This paper seeks to draw empirical attention to the relationship between legitimacy and reputation in institutionalized fields. Norwegian hospitals find themselves in a strongly institutionalized field and do not want to differentiate from each other, despite seeking a favorable reputation. In order to acquire insights into the conditions that prompt organizations to reject differentiation, we carried out qualitative interviews with the hospitals’ communication directors. Three sets of justifications for not differentiating emerged from an inductive analysis of these interviews. Differentiation is not adapted to the universalistic needs of the hospitals, not in accordance with solidarity norms, and not a pragmatic solution. The analysis suggests that the hospitals face a trade-off between the contradictory demands of similarity and difference and hence legitimacy and reputation: They renounce the advantage of a unique reputation (i.e. competitive advantage) in order to retain the benefits of conformity (i.e. legitimacy). Implications of these findings for our understanding of the relative salience of legitimacy and reputation and the dynamics between them are discussed.

Building the Hydrogen Highway: the Visions of a Large-Scale Hydrogen Project in Norway

This paper focuses on the visions incorporated by the Hydrogen Road in Norway (HyNor) project. This is a large-scale project that aims to demonstrate real life implementation of hydrogen in the transport sector in Norway. The starting point of the analysis is that visions play an important role in technological projects. Visions carry, communicate and construct valid practices and meanings in technology. Consequently, visions in technological projects should be a matter of analysis. The following paper discusses both the meaning of technological visions and the kinds of visions that have been deployed in the HyNor project. This discussion shows that HyNors visions are numerous, flexible and dynamic. Furthermore the ambivalence and tension in the projects visions represent a challenge that needs to be dealt with.

Building a Sector Reputation: The Strategic Communication of National Higher Education

ABSTRACT What characterises strategic communication aimed at building the reputation of an entire public subsector? This is the main question for this study, pursued through content analysis of one-stop web portals for national higher education from the 21 countries listed in the Times Higher Education’s Top 150 Universities ranking. Findings show that strategic communication is formed by national governments to depict their higher education sector as a coherent whole without letting prominent universities “represent” the higher education sector. The tension between similarity and difference that often occurs in public sector reputation-building is handled partly by emphasising similarity concerns in the structure and format of the presentations, and partly by emphasising differentiation concerns in the contents of the presentations. Furthermore, in contrast to previous studies addressing either the reputation management and branding efforts of single institutions, specific public sector entities, or those of nations, this study shows how higher education reputation-building integrates these different levels through strategic communication.

Transforming the “Third Mission” in Norwegian Higher Education Institutions: A Boundary Object Theory Approach

ABSTRACT Higher education institutions (HEIs) in Norway have been subjected to several reforms in recent decades. There are transformed relationships between institutions and their environment, and higher educations’ third mission is emphasized. To improve our understanding of HEIs’ third mission, this paper employs boundary object theory, enabling us to see how shifting projects are shaped and negotiated within these institutions. The paper concludes with a discussion of five main projects that are evident in third-mission presentations: the entrepreneurial project, the local and regional involvement project, the mode 2 project, the popular-science project, and the reputation project.

Smart, but is It Sustainable? : The Importance of Reconciling Non-Technical Concerns in Grid-Development Policies

Electricity grids in Europe are currently undergoing numerous changes. New grid development projects are proposed everywhere. This is partly caused by the Renewable Energy Sources (RES) directive of 2009 that specifies national targets that all countries must achieve by 2020. In Norway the on-shore renewable share is already high — around 60 percent, but as an EEA (European Economic Area) country Norway has agreed to increase this share to 67.5 percent. In Sweden the target is 49 percent, but the government has published the ambition to reach a renewable target beyond 50 percent by 2020. As a consequence, a number of efforts are being made to stimulate renewables. From 2012, a joint certificate market has been established between Norway and Sweden and, for 2020, a target has been set of 26.4 TWh of renewable electricity production. The political commitment to be submitted in accordance with the RES Directive targets will be shared equally between Norway and Sweden, with 13.2 TWh each, but given the market orientation of the policy scheme the actual investment will be located where investors find it most attractive. There are a lot of opinions and much public discussion surrounding renewables (Toke, 2005; Wustenhagen et al., 2007), but without well-functioning electricity grids, electricity will never reach the market. In the last few years, investments in the upgrade and development of transmission lines have notably increased.

What We Stand For: Reputation Platforms in Scandinavian Higher Education

This chapter examines the prevalence and contents of core value statements used by Scandinavian higher education institutions as a platform for their reputation management initiatives. The findings suggest that core value statements are not a universal phenomenon, although their presence suggests some degree of institutionalization. Analyzing the core value statements of 36 universities and university colleges, the study finds that these institutions seek to be known for unique, but quite generic and abstract values. Overall, Scandinavian universities and university colleges rely only modestly on traditional higher education values. The contents of their values predominantly implicate technical/professional and moral reputations, with some variation associated with country of origin, international ranking score, and whether the institution is a university, university college, or professional college.