Organizational Reputation, Regulatory Talk, and Strategic Silence

To what extent and how do agencies manage their reputations through the strategic use of communication? Under what conditions are regulators inclined to respond to external judgments of their performance, and when are they disposed to keep silent? Based on a comprehensive data set and quantitative content analysis of the Israeli banking regulator's responses to public expressions of opinion between 1998 and mid-2009, we show how this agency tends to keep silent on issues regarding which it generally enjoys a strong reputation, and on issues that lie outside its distinct jurisdiction, while responding to opinions about core functional areas with regards to which its reputation is weaker and areas wherein its reputation is still evolving. These findings, although based on one institution, are important because they demonstrate how an agency's assessment of the relative threat to its reputation is implicated in distinct communicative patterns across functional areas. They also demonstrate that words are actions, and, occasionally, so is regulatory silence.