Narrow Results

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.

Little is known about the level of youth participation in voluntary services and “Other Learning Experiences” (OLE) related community service among secondary school students in Hong Kong. This study attempts to provide a preliminary descriptive overview of youth participation in volunteering and OLE related community service. A total of 1,046 secondary school students were recruited to fill in a self-administered questionnaire. This study is relevant to social workers who should be aware of the current volunteer situation in Hong Kong. Such information is an essential foundation for them to plan, organize, execute and evaluate service programs.

This study explores class differences in charitable giving and volunteering in three megacities in China. It investigates whether the association between social class and these altruistic behaviors varies within the middle class when we differentiate the core middle class from the semi-core middle class and the marginal middle class. The results show class disparity in both charitable giving and volunteering and indicate differences within the middle class. There is evidence in support of the mediation effect of civic engagement on the association between social class and pro-social behaviors, which is particularly evident among the core middle class. Our empirical evidence also points to the influence of the quality of social networks on pro-social behaviors. The study contributes new empirical evidence to the existing literature on altruistic behaviors in China and improves our understanding of the role of social capital in this regard of social life.