Brand orientations in the public sector

Public organizations increasingly follow a brand orientation; meaning they view themselves primarily through the lens of branding, spend resources on communicating what they do, and specifically on creating attractive and legitimate images of themselves. Our project aims to generate a systematic analysis of organizational and societal consequences – productive as well as destructive – of the processes and outcomes of a brand orientation in public organizations. This will be done through qualitative case studies (including interviews, document studies, netnography and critical incident technique) of city organizations in Sweden and in the United States from 2018 to 2020.