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Crowdfunding campaigns reflect the personality traits of the entrepreneur, influencing the chances of a successful fundraising. In this study, the authors focus on three different entrepreneurs’ personality dark traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. Through a text analysis of 338 equity-crowdfunding campaigns in the UK, the authors identified narcissistic expressions used by entrepreneurs in their pitches, and their impact on funding success. The authors found an inverted U-shape relationship between entrepreneurs’ narcissism and the crowdfunding success. On the other hand, entrepreneurs’ psychopathy has a negative linear relationship with crowdfunding success. This study contributes to the entrepreneurship literature, highlighting the importance of displayed entrepreneurs’ personality traits in engaging with crowd investors.

Cluster analysis is applied to the union and employer tactics used in a sample of Ontario organising campaigns to identify the combinations of tactics or strategies that are used most often. Seven union organising strategies and five employer resistance strategies are revealed. Contingency table analysis shows that the union and employer strategies are not independent of one another. More active campaigns by one side (in terms of more tactics used) are met by more active campaigns by the other side. Regression analysis is used to estimate the effects of the strategies on the outcome of the organising campaign. The most active strategies, including intensive communication with workers and worker committees, work best for the employers. For unions, strategies emphasising personal communication through house calls are the most effective.

Though the coexistence of nonviolent and violent groups within a single movement is a common phenomenon in maximalist campaigns (e.g., regime change, anti-occupation), the effects of this coexistence remain understudied. Focusing on primarily nonviolent movements with a simultaneous “radical flank” pursuing the same goals, this study builds on previous, inconclusive literature which narrowly accounts for limited and often case-specific radical flank effects. After conducting a series of large-N regression analyses using a subset of the NAVCO 2.0 dataset, this study finds that the presence of a radical flank (1) increases both the likelihood and degree of repression by the state and (2) is most significantly linked with decreased mobilization post-repression – yet, (3) is not necessarily detrimental to overall campaign progress.

This study examines how narratives and legitimacy formation affect crowdfunding capital assembly from distributed, heterogeneous investors.

The study explores a dataset of 80,181 projects from Kickstarter, a rewards-based crowdfunding platform, between 2009 and 2013. We explore the link between project-related variables, legitimacy formation and outcomes.

Entrepreneurs design narratives and create project legitimacy by exploiting crowdfunding platform-specific features. First, lower funding targets and shorter campaign durations confer positive project legitimacy. Second, entrepreneurs exploit reward-levels as narrative tools that encourage funders to engage with the project. Third, visual pitches transmit a broader sociocultural narrative, leveraging emotional rather than financial reasoning. We also note certain gender effects.

Crowdfunding platforms allow entrepreneurs to pitch business ideas to a broad online audience. We show that project legitimacy, including both structural and narrative elements, is linked to crowdfunding outcomes. In particular, legitimacy is co-created through the generation of a persuasive narrative linking the entrepreneur and investor cohort.

Entrepreneurs use crowdfunding platforms to generate a coherent narrative around unfamiliar business models. Generic platform tools may be set and manipulated in online crowdfunding pitches to support project legitimacy. Ultimately, these are less important than establishing an affinity-based narrative that engages and exploits investor participation. Successful crowdfunding pitches co-author the project story with investors.

Crowdfunding has been traditionally understood as simply an online-mediated venture resource assembly tool. A narrative framework highlights the critical role of legitimacy formation in a disintermediated investment system.

In Senegal, the government has encouraged private investment in agriculture and biofuel production since the 2000s, generating several attempted or effective large-scale land acquisitions by domestic and international investors. In reaction to these projects, local groups of opponents have joined forces with national peasant organizations, civil society associations, and think tanks to resist perceived land grabs. This article examines the emergence of this social movement and explains why anti-land grabs campaigns were successful in halting some projects, but not successful in others. I argue that four main factors are at play: a strong mobilization of local populations measured by group cohesion and level of determination; the assistance of national and international NGOs in scaling up protests beyond the local level; the capacity of opponents to harness the support of influential elites and decision-makers; and the legal status of the land under contention. This paper draws on an analysis of secondary data, qualitative interviews, and field observations carried out in Senegal for several months from 2013 to 2018.

Crowdfunding (CF) has been recognized by media narrations as a disruptive approach to funding social entrepreneurship, although there is a lack of evidence in academic literature about factors capable of supporting social entrepreneurs in developing a successful CF campaign. This chapter aims to improve both academic knowledge and CF practice in those areas that can effectively support social entrepreneurs in managing their campaigns. An empirical analysis of 250 CF campaigns launched by Italian social enterprises was conducted. We focused on three main issues in terms of their effect on the overall level of funding achieved: the social enterprise’s network, the choice of CF platform, and CF campaign design. Our results demonstrate that the social enterprise’s presence on Twitter, the choice of a specific reward-based platform, and active management of the CF campaign have a significant impact on the achievement of the funding goal.

The “Battle in Seattle” has been credited with giving birth to a new, more radical phase in transnational social movement organizing; yet evidence suggests it may be misleading to speak of “global” social movements. In Seattle in 1999, the contribution of transnational movement organizations was quite modest compared with that of conventional, nationally based interest groups that focused on local resource mobilization and ideational preparation. This suggests that the basis of the new “global” social movements may be the well-established process of resource mobilization by which organized interest groups provide support for local activist communities.