Reputation

I. Read and translate the text.

Reputation of a social entity (a person, a social group, an organization) is an opinion about that entity, typically a result of social evaluation on a set of criteria. It is important in business, education, online communities, and many other fields. Reputation may be considered as a component of identity as defined by others.

Reputation is known to be a ubiquitous, spontaneous, and highly efficient mechanism of social control in natural societies. It is a subject of study in social, management and technological sciences. Its influence ranges from competitive settings, like markets, to cooperative ones, like firms, organisations, institutions and communities. Furthermore, reputation acts on different levels of agency, individual and supra-individual. At the supra-individual level, it concerns groups, communities, collectives and abstract social entities (such as firms, corporations, organizations, countries, cultures and even civilizations). It affects phenomena of different scales, from everyday life to relationships between nations. Reputation is a fundamental instrument of social order, based upon distributed, spontaneous social control.

Until very recently the cognitive nature of reputation was substantially ignored. This has caused a misunderstanding of the effective role of reputation in a number of real-life domains and related scientific fields. In the study of cooperation and social dilemmas, the role of reputation as a partner selection mechanism started to be appreciated in the early 1980s.

Working toward such a definition, reputation as a socially transmitted (meta-) belief (i.e., belief about belief) concerns properties of agents, namely their attitudes toward some socially desirable behaviour, be it cooperation, reciprocity, or norm-compliance.

Reputation plays a crucial role in the evolution of these behaviours: reputation transmission allows socially desirable behaviour to spread. Rather than concentrating on the property only, the cognitive model of reputation accounts also for the transmis - sibility and therefore for the propagation of reputation.

A recommendation can be extremely precise; in the stock market, for example, an adviser, when discussing the reputation of a bond, can supplement his informed opinion with both historical series and current events. On the other hand, in informal settings, gossip, although vague, may contain precious hints both to facts (" I've been told this physician has shown questionable behavior") and to conflicts taking place at the information level (if a candidate for a role spreads defamatory about another candidate, who should you trust?).

Moreover, the expression " it is said that John Smith is a cheater" is intrinsically a reputation spreading act, because on the one hand it refers to a (possibly false) common opinion, and on the other hand the very act of saying " it is said" is self-assessing, since it provides at least one factual occasion when that

Unit V Reputation_____________________________________________________________

something is said, exactly for the fact the person who says so (the gossiper), while appearing to spread the saying a bit further, may actually be in the phase of initiating it.

(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

II. Read and memorize the following words:

account v. for – служить причиной чего-л., объяснять

affect v. – влиять, воздействовать

appreciate v. – оценивать

cheater - мошенник, обманщик, жулик, шулер

cognitive - познавательный

concern v. - касаться, относиться

consider v. – рассмотреть, рассматривать, изучить, обдумать

defamatory- клеветнический, дискредитирующий

desirable - желательный, целесообразный

entity – организация, предприятие, субъект

evaluation – оценка, оценивание

furthermore – кроме того, более того

gossip - сплетня, болтовня, злословие

hint – намёк

intrinsically – неразрывно. изначально

norm-compliance – соответствие нормам

precious – манерно-изысканный

precise – точный, чёткий

range v. from – колебаться в известных пределах

reciprocity - взаимность, обоюдность, взаимопомощь, взаимодействие

related – связанный, относящийся

self-assessing - самооценка

substantially – существенно, значительно, основательно

transmissibility - передаваемость

ubiquitous – вездесущий, повсеместный

vague – неопределённый, туманный, неясный, непонятный