Master‟s Thesis: 30 higher education credits Programme: Master‟s Programme in International Administration and Global Governance Date: 30 January 2018 Supervisor: Kohei Suzuki Words: 11518 IMPORTANCE OF REPUTATION FOR THE HUMANITARIAN NGOS Qualitative Study of the Danish Humanitarian NGOs

Abstract

The issue of reputation has been studied in a variety of contexts such as, for example, educational (Plewa et al. 2016), religious (Nordin 2015) and environmental (Liao 2018), however, most frequently in regards to its influence on firms and states (Gillies 2010). Few studies analyzed it from the perspective of a non-profit actor (Mitchell and Stroup 2017), but hardly any in relation to humanitarian NGOs. This paper aims at filling this research gap by answering the question of how reputation becomes important for the humanitarian non-profit actors and presenting a qualitative study of two Danish humanitarian organizations where interviews and participant observation were chosen as major data collection methods. The information obtained was further analyzed by application of the transaction-costs and resource-based theoretical frameworks typically used for analysis of the reputation‟s role for the actors of the private sector, which led to several findings. Firstly, reputation proved to be important for the non-profit actors under examination due to the fact that it was identified as one of the key factors having impact on the decision-making process in regards to opening of a new humanitarian operation. Secondly, there was established a connection between reputation of the organization and the amount of funds it collects from general public. Thus, two types of the reputation‟s potential implications for humanitarian actors were identified, which opened up this research area for further studies.