Localizing challenges: Perception and localization of societal threats in two bay areas

Civil society organizations (CSOs) are often portrayed as “agents” of urban change that respond to large-scale societal threats such as economic downturns, urban inequality, or environmental risks. Yet even within the same locality, CSOs differ markedly in how they perceive and localize threats. While some turn broader societal threats into actionable organizational mandates, others fail to do so. Our study proposes that managerialism, understood as the adoption of formal organizational practices, facilitates this localization by equipping CSOs with the reasoning and resources to bridge macro-level threats with organizational concerns. We test this proposition by drawing on qualitative and quantitative data from a comparative survey of randomly sampled CSOs in the two “Bay Areas” of Shenzhen, China, and San Francisco, United States—two tech-centered regions that exemplify contrasting urban regimes in the Global South and North. Adopting a two-stage selection model, we demonstrate that organizations geographically embedded in neighborhoods or cities are more likely to perceive societal threats and that managerial CSOs are subsequently more likely to localize them. Our findings highlight threat perception and localization as important precursors to organizations’ involvement in urban change, contributing to the literature on organizational dimensions of urban inequality, opportunity recognition in CSOs, and the role of managerialism in sustaining urban civil society.