Cross-sector partnerships are currently praised as capitalism’s key governance instrument to address development challenges. Although some concern has been raised about the effectiveness of such partnerships, little is known about their actual impact. Often it is assumed that partnership outputs transform straightforwardly into societal impact such as poverty alleviation. This article problematizes this assumption. Employing a critical micro-level study, which draws on a qualitative case study of a nongovernmental organization (NGO)–business partnership in Ghana, we examine how outputs provided by a partnership are put to use and perceived as beneficial from the point of view of its beneficiaries. The findings show that the partnership results in what we term “competences without agency” since it provides new resources and knowledge to the beneficiaries but fails to generate the conditions for these to be transformed into significant changes in their lives. Drawing on the concept of empowerment, we propose a new framework, which conceptualizes “impact as empowerment” and highlights currently unrecognized dynamics, which contribute to shaping the ability of a partnership to serve as a development agent.

Purpose -It is crucial for corporate communication to know how different public sources frame a crisis and how these sources influence each other. The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of Facebook by examiningif the public represented on Facebook contributes distinct frames to the discursive negotiation of a crisis at all, and whether the public represented on Facebook is able to influence the crisis framing of news media. Design/methodology/approach -The authors compared how four different public sources framed the Nestlé Kit Kat crisis: news media, corporate communication, NGOs, and Facebook users. The authors therefore, coded 5,185 sentences from the four sources and conducted a frame-analysis through the detection of co-occurrence between actors and attributions. A cross-correlation with a seven-day lag in each direction was applied to detect the frame-setting effects between the public represented on Facebook and news media. Findings -While the public represented on Facebook is found to apply distinct crisis frames in comparison to conventional sources, its frame-setting power is limited. In contrast to findings from political communication, it is rather the news media that influences the crisis framing in social media. The role of the public represented on Facebook, hence, appears marginal in comparison to news media that remain a major force in the discursive negotiation of a corporate crisis. Originality/value -As a first study, crisis framing in social media is compared with that of news media, NGOs, and corporate communication. Second, so far there have been no studies in the corporate communication field investigating the frame-setting effects between social media and news media. Contrary to social media's promising frame-setting power ascribed by some scholars, the authors do not find such effects with Facebook, the most popular social media tool to date.

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The article investigates the implications of mediatization for the legitimation strategies of humanitarian organizations. Based on a (full population) corpus of *400 pages of brochure material from 1970 to 2007, the micro-textual processes involved in humanitarian organizations' efforts to legitimate themselves and their moral claim were examined. A time trend analysis of the prioritization of actors in the material indicates that marked shifts in legitimation loci have taken place during the past 40 years. A discourse analysis unfolds the three dominant discourses behind these shifts, namely legitimation by accountancy, legitimation by institutionalization, and legitimation by compensation. The analysis relates these changes to a problem of trust associated with mediatization through processes of mediation.

The development of corporate communication in recent years has brought about a fading of the division of labor between commercial and non-commercial organizations. While the practices of commercial organizations are becoming increasingly ethicalized, so the practices of non-profit organizations are becoming increasingly commercialized. This paper explores the use of media discourse for the communication of ethical messages by humanitarian organizations, caught, as they are, in a tension between, on the one hand, the commercial strategies of visibility and still greater dependence on the media, and, on the other hand, the public’s skepticism toward mediated morality and what is commonly referred to as compassion fatigue. The issue is investigated through an analysis of a TV spot produced by the Danish section of Amnesty International in 2004. This spot is taken as an example of how the organization’s branding strategies testify to a high degree of reflexivity about the conditions of what Luc Boltanski calls a Crisis of Pity. The analysis illustrates how, in the face of compassion fatigue, the organization manages to carve out a new space for itself in the marketized ethical discourse, and leads to a discussion of the consequences of such rebranding for the construction of morality by the organization.