National Reputation Management and the Competition State: The Cases of Denmark and Norway

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