Reputationskrisen

This article first sets out to demonstrate the importance of trust for social order, which can be illustrated with the term “reputation”. Reputation makes reliable what we use as an orientation yardstick when we act. Reputation of institutions, organizations and persons of social significance evolves and collapses in public, mass mediated communication. The sudden collapse of reputation happens through intensive scandalizations. Mass mediated public communication has changed massively with the new structural transformation of the public sphere. This has led to a rapid increase of scandalizations. Second, this article shows the effects of scandalizations, one of them being the increased volatility of reputation, the central resource in gaining trust. But also, having changed itself recently, the scandalized elite has split between the social systems economy and politics, thus triggering novel and distinctly negative reputation dynamics. In this process, the deregulation of politics and economy is replaced by a moral re-regulation. Looking more closely at this process, third, one can realize why, in the rich history of scandalizations, it is now most of all the economic elite that has become the main target