Rice Business Professor Examines New Rules of Corporate Reputation
Rice University News
Date: Oct. 27, 2026
For much of the 20th century, companies had more time to shape their reputations and control information dissemination. Traditional media acted as gatekeepers, and crises played out over days or weeks in newspapers and broadcasts.
The Shifting Landscape
With the advent of social media, artificial intelligence, and online polarization, traditional reputation management tools have become fragmented. Organizations now need to navigate relationships with various stakeholders—shareholders, customers, employees, suppliers, the media, regulators, and the public—more swiftly and directly.
Intangible assets, such as patents, trademarks, copyrights, branding, software, proprietary data, customer relationships, trade secrets, and goodwill, have significantly increased in value, comprising over 90% of the market value of S&P 500 companies, up from 17% in 1975.
Anastasiya Zavyalova's Research
Rice Business professor Anastasiya Zavyalova studies how these changes are influencing "organizational social evaluations"—the collective judgments audiences form about a company. She recently co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Organizational Social Evaluations, a comprehensive 720-page volume that brings together cross-disciplinary research and practitioner insights.
The Handbook
The project originated from discussions at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Corporate Reputation, where Zavyalova is an international fellow. The handbook brings together scholars from diverse fields and practitioner experiences, offering critical insights for business managers and executives.
Zavyalova: "The project came out of conversations at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Corporate Reputation... We were talking about research on what we now call social evaluations of organizations."
Intangibles and Reputation
In the 1970s, companies' market value primarily derived from tangible assets. However, in the past 25 years, valuation has become increasingly intangible, focusing on stakeholders' beliefs about a company's future earnings and its ability to deliver on promises.
"A big part of [company valuation] is reputation... What do investors think? What do shareholders believe they will get out of this company?"
Acquisitions illustrate this shift, where the value placed on a company often reflects stakeholder trust and future expectations rather than physical assets.
Zavyalova: "When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion, most of the purchase price was goodwill... It was essentially belief that the company would provide value in the future."
The research on organizational social evaluations has significantly grown over the past two decades, highlighting the importance of this area for practitioners.