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This paper reviews the extent to which feminist viewpoints are incorporated in NGO interventions aimed at women's development in Bangladesh by examining major feminist perspectives alongside NGO intervention strategies. Based on fieldwork experiences in four NGOs, it determines that NGOs are not following any specific feminist theory, but rather interventions are influenced by development paradigms engrossed in western feminist perspectives. The paper finds that third world feminism is more pertinent to the socioeconomic context of Bangladesh. However, this perspective is alone insufficient to bring desired change, rather the blending of feminist views may be more conducive to women development in Bangladesh. It concludes that the understanding of feminist theories is of greater importance for NGO practitioners and social workers to effectively address the issue of women's development.

Empowerment is one of the most important social value creation activities performed by social enterprises (SEs). Despite the burgeoning research on SEs, there is limited research on the meaning and aspects of empowerment from the SE perspective, or the so-called SE-as-Empowerment research. In light of this research gap, we employed the Gioia’s methodology and data triangulation to analyze a renowned Hong Kong’s SE that focuses on youth empowerment. This study contributes to the SE-as-Empowerment literature by revealing five types of empowerment — building social awareness, meaningful participation, social connections, building entrepreneurial skills, and power sharing between youths and adults — which can be broadly categorized into social-capacity empowerment and entrepreneurial-capacity empowerment. This study makes novel contributions to the SE-as-Empowerment literature by proposing new concepts including multi-directional (internally and externally oriented) aspect of empowerment, the pluralistic notion of agency, and power sharing between youths and adults as important elements of youth empowerment in SE. Finally, we discuss the implications of this study for the SE practitioners, educators, and policy makers and propose avenues for future research.

This article presented empirical information to explore and examine the advocacy activities conducted by social workers in Hong Kong. The effectiveness of the advocacy activities as perceived by the social workers are measured and matched with the actual practice. Reasons for undertaking advocacy are collected. The determinants of advocacy include: recognition of the importance of empowerment and relationship building between social workers and service users, helping service users exercise their rights and broaden their life options are instrumental in driving advocacy efforts. The sense of guilt is also a contributing factor behind certain advocacy activities. The importance of research and education in advocacy are emphasized.

The empowerment formalism offers a goal-independent utility function fully derived from an agent's embodiment. It produces intrinsic motivations which can be used to generate self-organizing behaviors in agents. One obstacle to the application of empowerment in more demanding (esp. continuous) domains is that previous ways of calculating empowerment have been very time consuming and only provided a proof-of-concept. In this paper we present a new approach to efficiently approximate empowerment as a parallel, linear, Gaussian channel capacity problem. We use pendulum balancing to demonstrate this new method, and compare it to earlier approximation methods.

This study explores how education and development in the skills and knowledge of foresight, innovation and enterprise (FI and E) relate to the empowerment of young individuals with respect to creating a new venture. In 2003, three groups of young persons aged between 13 and 18 years participated in a program designed for empowerment. An evaluation was conducted nine months later that provided useful insight into the impact of the education design, content and delivery. This research provides deeper insight into the way FI and E education can be used to create empowerment through the derivation of a framework that addresses entry, process and agency factors.

The ethical landscape of social entrepreneurship firms is at a nascent stage of development. To explore and potentially elevate this issue, this paper presents a conceptual model and accompanying research propositions to enhance the ethical climate surrounding social entrepreneurship. The conceptual model includes three compound constructs—ethical empowering leadership, perceived ethical organizational support and empowered employee ethical voice—augmented with two established constructs, a code of ethics and ethics training. A literature review is provided as supporting information for the conceptual model and associated research propositions. Potential applications and research implications are also presented.

This article examines the effects of the Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) policy on black entrepreneurship in South Africa. The BBBEE policy is a legal framework aimed at addressing historical inequalities by promoting equal opportunities and encouraging the participation of black individuals in the economy. The policy highlights include increased access to funding for previously marginalized groups to start and grow their businesses, improved market access to encourage large businesses to partner with small businesses owned by previously marginalized groups, and increased skills and development. Using the policy as a quasi-natural experiment, the study adopts a difference-in-difference estimation technique contrasting periods before and after implementation and measuring its effectiveness on black entrepreneurial entry. Results from the analysis indicate that the policy was ineffective in improving black entrepreneurship in South Africa.

The case study of the Mayflower Vehicle Systems PLC supply chain improvement programme offers a window onto a change programme implemented by one supply chain cluster of the UK automotive industry. The discussion details the transformational nature of change agent empowerment, stakeholder engagement, team-working and the dynamics of intra-firm and customer-supplier collaboration between a first tier company and its sub-suppliers. It shows that improvement programmes have a crucial function in helping customer and suppliers to closer collaboration through enabling them to work towards common objectives, to understand each other's positions, and to build on a platform of mutual trust as they strive to improve their individual and collective competitiveness and establish mechanisms to ensure that improvements are sustainable. The study has further value in illuminating the adaptation of a lean production model akin to the Toyota Production System to a specific case supported by the Accelerate Initiative and facilitated by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders' Industry Forum.

This paper examines innovation and change activities in knowledge-intensive business service (KIBS) firms from the perspective of innovative behaviour. Earlier studies have shown that innovation activities in these firms are typically dispersed around the organisation and intertwined with service delivery. Drawing on the theories of innovative behaviour, we map out the variety of micro-level innovation and change activities at three KIBS firms. Our findings suggest that various types of innovative behaviour take place throughout an innovation or change process: idea generation continues until the end of the process and application starts in its early stages. The study also confirms earlier results on the dispersed nature of innovation and change activities in KIBS firms, although different role expectations limited employees' innovative behaviour. Innovative behaviour was performed as both in- and extra-role behaviour at different organisational levels. These findings have implications for both researchers and practitioners.

We examine the effects of empowerment and knowledge sharing on employee innovative behaviours and explore gender differences. The study draws on a sample of 305 employees from the UAE (United Arab Emirates) service sector. Based on an extensive literature review, we develop a conceptual model and formulate four main hypotheses. Statistical analysis was conducted using structural equation modelling with Smart-Partial Least Squares (PLS). The results clearly show and confirm that feelings of empowerment and knowledge sharing have strong and significant impacts on employee innovative behaviours. Surprising and quite interestingly, females report greater feelings of empowerment but were less inclined to engage in knowledge sharing. The findings also show significant gender differences in relation to the impacts of empowerment and knowledge sharing on innovative behaviours. The above gender disparities seem to be specific to the UAE contexts which are discussed. The implications of the above findings for management practice and future research are also discussed.

This paper proposes a critical reflection on the use of language to address the challenge of promoting and supporting civic agencies in adaptation to increasing extreme weather risk. Such reflection needs to focus on the opportunities and limitations of language, and the navigation amongst multiple or contested meanings within interdisciplinary and inter-sectorial collaborations. This commentary was inspired by the authors’ conversations on their journey in writing the paper — Liguori et al. (2023) “Exploring the uses of arts-led community spaces to build resilience: Applied storytelling for successful co-creative work” and the impact it had on their understanding of various language systems. Here writing was conceived as a form of networking, undertaking a sequence of intimate, in-depth discussions in a safe space. ‘Playing’ with words, moving out from our disciplinary homes, provided a fertile way of thinking within multi/inter-sectorial/disciplinary conversations to expand the language system for meaningful community engagement around local climate adaptation. Three key terms were at the core of these diverse — and sometimes divergent — ways of looking at social preparedness for extreme weather events: disruption, empowerment, and creative ecosystem. The meta-reflections, based on iterative conversations around these three key terms, highlight the importance of explorations of language as a generative meaning-making process that can be boundary-spanning.

There is significant value in understanding the implications of language used in public engagement — its different interpretations, their loading and potential for transformed thinking when conceived creatively. Such insight can contribute to more effective approaches for participatory research and practice working with communities when addressing issues related to climate adaptation. This commentary argues that the socially engaged or participatory arts are particularly well placed to be active in such processes.

Property is one of the important instrumental elements, in the empowerment of women. Matrilineal system in Kerala had privileged Nayar women to inherit property. Inheritance of property rights among Nayar women had undergone dramatic changes during and since the British period. It is difficult to understand the relationship between property and women empowerment as property relations are imbricate and constantly changing. In this paper, I explore how the nature of property influences women empowerment in different regions of Kerala. The sociological contours of property relations of Nayar women are explored to understand how property becomes an agent that helps women to exercise power in the family and bargain within matriliny. The material, cultural and political relations around property need to be reckoned in understanding the power dynamics within the gender relations in Nayar community in Kerala.

This chapter aims to investigate how banks build their dynamic capabilities and deal with corollary rigidities in the era of digital open innovation. Our analysis of two in-depth case studies stresses the challenges that banks face in the era of digitalization. It indicates that banks are transforming themselves deeply in terms of organizational structure, internal processes and interactions, and individual competences; human resistance to change and core rigidities being the most challenging issues to solve. Our results show that people-centered managerial practices — rather than purely technology-centered ones — seem to be highly promising to develop dynamic capabilities within banks. To succeed in developing their innovative capabilities banks have to find the right balance between the external constraints due to the specificity of their activities and the desire and need to innovate in order to satisfy their interconnected clients. To achieve this delicate equilibrium and proceed to the appropriate structural and organizational changes, awareness and collective mindset from banks’ executive management appear certainly as one if not the first determining factor to succeed.

The changing consumption patterns and sustainability considerations of tourists encouraged ecotourism across the globe. But without the appropriate management and planning systems, tourism in ecologically sensitive areas could threaten the harmony of ecosystems and local cultures. Tourism projects/models that stress local community ownership and control can maximize environmental and fiscal benefits and empower the community through tourism practices. Mawlynnong, nicknamed as “God’s Own Garden,” is a village in the East Khasi Hills of Meghalaya acclaimed as the “Cleanest village in Asia” by Discover India in 2003. This case study contributes to the understanding of community practices for the development of tourism within the social and cultural milieu. Participant observation, interviews and secondary sources are used for this study. The results show that cleanliness, aesthetic beauty, matrilineal societal system, empowered women and girls, education, heritage, local community-tourist engagement and basic infrastructure paved the way to a viable tourism development of the society. This sustainable model explores how a holistic and participatory process can bring substantial changes in local communities by creating livelihood, maintaining the natural environment, spreading the message of protection and conservation of the ecosystem, stabilizing local economies and increasing community control.

Credit is scarce and capital does not flow naturally from the rich to the poor. The poor have low access to bank credit because of the lack of collateral and because traditional financial institutions find it costly to deal with small credit transactions. Microfinance largely facilitates the poor’s access to institutional credit and has both economic and noneconomic impacts including poverty alleviation, women empowerment, and promotion of gender equality. However, microfinance is not a panacea for poverty alleviation and credit remains inaccessible to certain sectors of society especially the poorest of the poor. To benefit greater segments of society, microfinance should be part of a broader strategy that combines it with other social protection programs.

This paper conceptualizes novel segmental development strategy through Niche Empowerment on the prioritized area of "innovations." It argues the importance of a mechanism to improve the utilization and adaptation of available information and local knowledge to create valued activities that generate localized innovations. To do that, without thinking what they do not have, they must try to make use what they have at fullest capacity. More focused mechanism to identify and empower grassroots inventors as supply side community to invent what country needs, moreover help them to commercialize their inventions, would give opportunity to overcome lack of inventions and bridging the cognitive divide of stagnating countries in digital age.