The case
A fanbase is widely called intense, loyal, entitled or knowledgeable (A2’s example: “Philadelphia sports fans are notoriously intense”). Its membership turns over and the behaviour that earned the name may change, but the name stays. Visiting fans expect hostility and act defensively; police and stadium staff plan for it; some members embrace the name and perform it, others reject it.
A2 wrote the three properties as P1, many members of F exhibit a; P2, others believe F exhibits a; P3, that belief shapes the behaviour of F. “These can vary independently.”
What it can show
That a property can be attributed to a collective through a relation with its audiences, independently of the current distribution of its members’ traits, and that the attribution can feed back into what the collective does. A5 §4 split the feedback into two paths: through outsiders’ responses, and through insiders’ identification. Only the second makes the reputation part of the collective’s own reproduction, and A5 added a selection path: a reputation can attract members who like it and repel those who do not, so over generations the attribution can change the membership. That is regulative attribution (THEORY-137) widened from mental states to conduct and character, and a case for QUESTION-049’s shaping side.
It cannot show that the reputation is accurate, that the fanbase has the disposition, or that any reputation was in fact self-fulfilling. Gioia, Schultz and Corley’s identity–image feedback (LIT-1135, unread) is the organizational-studies form. A4’s discriminating variation: compare judgments of audiences who know the reputation with those who do not, against the same observed behaviour.
Note of 2026-10-29: Gioia, Schultz and Corley, read
LIT-1135, which “What it can show” cites as unread, is now read (NOTE-1389), so that no longer holds. A2’s split is close to the paper’s split between identity, reputation and construed external image, and the paper’s process model is A5’s insider-identification path: members compare who they think they are with who they think outsiders think they are, and change one or the other. The paper also makes reputation the slow variable (“relatively stable, long-term”), against an identity that can shift quickly, which fits a reputation that outlasts the behaviour that earned it. It does not study a reputation that is wrong, and it does not consider A5’s selection path, a reputation that attracts or repels members. The case is unchanged.