I am a postdoctoral researcher in the research groups Politics & Public Governance (PPG, Departement of Political Sciences) and Computational Linguistics & Psycholinguistics (CLiPS, Departement of Linguistics) at the University of Antwerp. In 2019, I was awarded a senior postdoc grant from the Flemish Research Council to work on the project “Reputation and Structural Reforms of Public Organizations: Explaining Temporal Dynamics”. In 2021, I received an additional postdoc grant from the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) for my proposal “Breaking the Cycle: On the dynamics between reputation and innovation in government organizations”. I also teach at the Antwerp Management School and University of Antwerp, and previously taught at Tilburg University.
PhD in Public Management, 2016
University of Antwerp
Master in Business Communication, 2012
University of Ghent
Master in Political Communication, 2011
University of Antwerp
Why do public sector organisations target different stakeholder audiences when managing their reputations? This is the question we wanted to address in our recent Policy & Politics article entitled What determines the audiences that public service organisations target for reputation management. A basic tenet in the reputation literature is that organisations are sensitive to their environment. Different audiences (be it clients, politicians, the media and others) expect different things from public service organisations, so how do they manage such conflicting demands?
Many would agree that, at least in Western democracies, we live in what is referred to as “mediatised societies”. These are generally understood to be societies in which the media somehow penetrate and affect the way central institutions of our societies function. This includes the public agencies responsible for service delivery, regulation, policy formulation or providing subsidies. Not unlike their political counterparts which have been more intensely studied, many of the media departments of public agencies have witnessed a substantial professionalisation in recent years.