National Reputation Management and the Competition State

The paper deals with the national reputation programmes of Denmark and Norway in the period 2005-2010. The first section demonstrates how national reputation management emerged as a part of the globalization discourse and illustrates its hybrid character. The paper then gives a short overview of the two approaches, nation branding and public diplomacy. In the next section, national reputation management efforts in Denmark and Norway are compared according to three variables: how they were launched in response to globalization, the role of consultants, and the countries' different institutional settings. The article concludes with a discussion of how the elements of national reputation management interact in the initiatives of the two countries and how this relates to the general change in the relationship between nation-states on the global scene. The paper concludes that Norway and Denmark represent two different variations of a new, hybrid national reputation management. In the Norwegian case, the political and cultural spheres infiltrated the commercial sphere, while in Denmark, the commercial sphere infiltrated the cultural and political spheres