Worlds Apart: Social Entrepreneurship Discourse in Croatian Media

Abstract

The concepts of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship have been ever more present in public discourse during the past 20-30 years, along with radically different views of the kind and level of socioeconomic or political change that these specific economic ventures (should) aim for. Although social enterprise discourse is often dominated by neoliberal perspectives, which present market-based activity as simply an efficient means of solving all kinds of more or less local and isolated social problems, more critically minded strands of research have been questioning this approach and calling for a broader and more critical perspective. This paper aims to see how these opposing discourses are represented in the Croatian news media, as a discursive sphere which is accessible to a broad public. The analysis focuses on online media in the period 2007-2019 and is based on a comparison between three media types: the online versions of a national daily newspaper and a regional daily newspaper, as well as an online-only progressive non-profit news site. A stark contrast is apparent between mainstream commercial media and alternative non-profit media, i.e. a dominance of neoliberal “enterprise discourse” in the former and more emphasis on a broader political and economic agenda calling for more fundamental, comprehensive and long-term change in the latter.