We conduct to in-depth cases studies of two social enterprises that provide employment to people from low income, marginalized communities in India based on 34 interviews and secondary data. We analyse how the social enterprises manage the ongoing process of institutional translation towards customers and producers and how they deal with translation problems. We observe an interplay between persuasive and performative institutional translation with persuasion being more relevant to customers and performance being critical to producers. When larger barriers, e.g. differences in culture, knowledge and power, need to be overcome, institutional translation becomes a bi-directional process resulting in the social enterprise evolving. Tensions arise as narratives used in institutional translation towards customers and producers differ significantly, which explains some of the tensions observed in hybrid organizations.
