Humanitarian NGOs as Businesses and Managers: Theoretical Reflection on an Under-Explored Phenomenon

Humanitarian nonprofit nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) today exhibit signs of "marketization" and behave like firms, according to a frequently uttered claim in the scholarly literature. However, it is not precisely clear what marketization and behaving like a firm mean. Drawing on the literature concerning nonprofit organizations and public administration, we offer a more sophisticated and multifaceted understanding of a consequential development for NGOs. Rather than merely equating "firm-like" with the adoption of corporate practices, we conceive of it as a mind-set. We suggest that "firm-like" involves not only marketization, but also corporatization and organizational rationalization. Based on a content analysis of the websites of a heterogeneous sample of nine humanitarian NGOs, we illustrate the potential of this conceptualization to shed light on a discourse among these organizations that appears to be self-referential and self-aggrandizing with respect to their capacities.