Empowerment of women has emerged as an important issue in recent times. The economic empowerment of women is being regarded these days as a Sine-quo-non of progress for a country; hence, the issue of economic empowerment of women is of paramount importance to political thinkers, social scientists and reformers. The Self Help Groups (SHGs) have paved the way for economic independence of rural wo...

With radical roots in the 1980s, women’s empowerment is now a mainstream development concern. Much of the narrative focuses on instrumental gains—what women can do for development rather than what development can do for women. Empowerment is treated as a destination reached through development’s equivalent of motorways: programmes rolled out over any terrain. But in the process, pathways women ...

Recent research has hypothesized that empowerment can arise from collective action through collective self-objectification (CSO), defined as action that actualizes participants' social identity against the power of dominant groups. Activists (N = 37) described several experiences that made them feel empowered (and disempowered). Among the various explanations they offered for these feelings, th...

BACKGROUND While the Iranian nursing profession tries to reach to its full capacity for participating in the maintenance of public health, its desire to develop is strongly influenced by cultural, economic, and religious factors. The concept of empowerment is frequently used in nursing and the health services, particularly in relation to the quality of care, since the mission of nursing is to p...

We define a new index for the collective empowerment of populations based on the capability of actors to have relationships and to enter into networks. This index, called “relational capability” (RC), is dynamic in the sense that the weights of its various components vary across time according to how close the population is to some poverty threshold. It relies on a shift of anthropological view...

Today, more than 70 per cent of organizations have adopted some kind of empowerment initiative for at least part of their workforce (Lawler et al., 2001). To be successful in today’s global business environment, companies need the knowledge, ideas, energy, and creativity of every employee, from front line workers to the top level managers in the executive suite. The best organizations accomplis...

BACKGROUND While community mobilization has been widely endorsed as an important component of HIV prevention among vulnerable populations such as female sex workers (FSWs), there is uncertainty as to the mechanism through which it impacts upon HIV risk. We explored the hypothesis that individual and collective empowerment of FSW is an outcome of community mobilization, and we examined the means...