This paper explores the myth of entrepreneurship and its attachment to grand challenges, by studying the ideational dimension of South African entrepreneurship support organizations (ESOs) and their funders. More specifically, viewed as a form of high-stakes translations of traveling ideas, the study examines the domains of grand challenges that ESOs and their funders engage with, and the way they envision paths to address them in a context with structural injustices. Through a qualitative analysis of interviews with 29 representatives of 25 ESOs and their funders, all operating in South Africa, the study offers a nuanced account where grand challenges emanate from both world society and the local context. In turn, paths envisioned to address them aim for both stability and disruption. It is shown how entrepreneurship’s malleability allows respondents to accommodate a range of high-stakes translations. In addition, the study indicates that ESOs are more focused on the individual and organizational level, while funders aim more at the systemic level, testifying to the importance of looking at multi-sector partnerships. In sum, the study contributes to previous research on entrepreneurship and grand challenges by demonstrating the malleable nature of high-stakes translations by ESOs and their funders.

Emotional communication, especially through social media platforms, has become a contemporary populist threat. While this phenomenon has been studied in for example news media and social movements, we know less about its influence on civil society organizations, despite their pluralism being a centerpiece in a vibrant democracy. More specifically, we do not know if social media make civil society organizations more isomorphic and thus decreasing the diversity of their emotional communication over time. This question is relevant given the broad range of organizational fields that civil society engages in, as well as the documented push toward especially extreme positivity on social media platforms. Given this background, the article explores the use of positive and negative sentiment, as well as of sentiment intensity, over time in the social media communication of different organizational fields of civil society. We employ sentiment analysis to analyze approximately 100,000 organizational posts on Facebook from 125 Swedish nonprofit organizations during 2015–2020. We find that the pluralism of civil society organizations across different fields, as regards emotional communication, is retained over time, thus not threatening the pluralism of civil society in this way. In addition, emotional communication, and especially positivity, increases over time in all fields in absolute terms. However, considering post length, the relative amount of emotional communication exhibits less of an increase. Rather, across all fields there is an unexpected isomorphism relating to posts becoming longer, while enticing less user engagement. This development, rather than the lack of pluralism, raises democratic concerns.

A few social media platforms have come to play a central role in civil society organizing, often functioning as organizing partners. But on whose terms? As organizing partners, commercial social media platforms shape the conditions under which civil society actors organize, also shaping organizational dynamics, visibility, and collective action. Far from being neutral partners, these platforms become battlegrounds where civil society actors and platform owners negotiate power, visibility, and control?differently affecting various forms of civil society actors and organizing. Therefore, we need to move beyond the notion of platforms as mere organizing agents to critically examine the opportunities and constraints they create for different civil society actors, as well as how different civil society actors navigate these. This requires considering both exogenous, contextual elements, and endogenous, actor-centered elements of civil society organizing. Doing so allows us to examine how organizing efforts emerge not simply on social media platforms but with them, requiring constant negotiation with platform logics. The collection of articles in this special issue shows how social media platforms enable civil society organizing, but also how platform-driven asymmetries emerge and play out differently according to the different features that characterize the civil society organizations at stake.

This article explores how foreign funders may promote good governance in a country without a history of established democratic processes. It examines the travel of ideas of democracy and human rights from Sweden to Russia through transnational cooperation projects during the period 1991–2005. Considering these projects as forms of high-stakes translations, the study finds that many of them engaged with Russian society only on a superficial level without embedding ideas in local organizational practices. Identifying the weaknesses often found in such translations, the study points to the difficulty of contributing to a democratic transformation of Russia by means of foreign-funded projects lacking contextual anchorage.

This chapter examines the organizational dynamics of social media-based new crisis initiatives that emerged in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with a particular focus on their communication. Drawing on empirical case studies, the authors explore how these loosely structured grassroots initiatives mobilized resources, coordinated action, and maintained engagement. The study highlights the central role of digital communication—particularly through Facebook—in enabling rapid mobilization and distributed decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. We find that some initiatives managed to adapt to changing circumstances through responsiveness to demands on social media. From a Luhmann-inspired CCO perspective, the findings on adaptability may be related to the relevance of decision communication on social media, which seems to enable self-referentiality in crisis responses as strategic praxis. The chapter contributes to communication research by challenging conventional assumptions about organizational “fitness,” offering a nuanced understanding of how communicative practices shape the development of ad hoc social collectives in crisis contexts. It calls for greater attention to the communicative constitution of organizations and the affordances and limitations of digital media in facilitating ephemeral but impactful forms of collective action.

Lyssna på experterna” är ett ofta upprepat mantra, men vad detta innebär är inte alltid självklart. Covid-19-pandemin synliggjorde svårigheterna i att få tag i och tillämpa expertkunskaper. Pandemins första skede präglades av stor efterfrågan på information. Många sökte sig då till sociala medier, där tidigare okända individer snabbt blev betrodda med att ge råd – de virala experterna.

I denna rapport analyserar vi 272 Facebookinlägg, författade av 136 individer, som delades flitigt under våren 2020. Vi kartlägger inläggens egenskaper och författarnas bakgrund, men också vilken legitimitetsbas, dvs. svaret på frågan ”varför ska ni lyssna på mig?”, som författarna åberopat.

De virala experterna har vitt skilda bakgrunder, men deras inlägg visar alla tecken på anpassning till en ny social medielogik, där budskap får mer legitimitet om de använder känslomässigt och förenklande språk, bildmaterial och hashtaggar. Personlig erfarenhet eller bara stor tilltro till det egna omdömet är också mer förekommande legitimitetsbaser på sociala medier, jämfört med den teoretiska expertkunskap som brukar underbygga expertuttalanden i etablerade medier.

Viral expertis kan vara en demokratisk tillgång: oväntade aktörer kan engagera sig i det offentliga samtalet och gör att nya röster blir hörda. Traditionella experter kan, genom att anpassa budskap till den sociala medielogiken, också nå ut med viktiga budskap till publiker som annars inte skulle lyssnat. På så sätt kan man stärka forskningskommunikationens genomslag. Men viral expertis kan också utgöra en fara för demokratin. När gängse mekanismer för att värdera experters legitimitet sätts ur spel, riskerar förvirring uppstå och komplicera spridningen av korrekt information, särskilt i krisers initiala skeden där osäkerheten är stor.