Mechanism For Empowerment Research Articles

Believing in climate change: help or hindrance for entrepreneurs’ resilience?

ABSTRACT In this paper, we examine in a holistic manner how entrepreneurs’ beliefs in climate change combine with psychological attributes and firm contextual conditions to produce high levels of personal resilience. To do so, we draw from complexity theory and employ a configurational approach with fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) using survey data from153 small business owners from Aberdeenshire, Scotland and Wyoming, USA, two regions where the local economies have traditionally been reliant on the fossil fuel industry. The analysis indicates that high entrepreneurial resilience arises from four unique configurations that capture the complex interactions of entrepreneurs’ beliefs about climate change with their psychological attributes of self-efficacy, optimism, and locus of control, along with the size and profitability of their firms. Analyzing patterns across the configurations reveals that efficacy-driven, optimistic internals (EOIs) develop high resilience through psychological synergy. Entrepreneurs who are climate conscious optimistic internals (CCOIs), climate conscious efficacy-driven internals (CCEIs) and climate conscious efficacy-driven optimists (CCEOs) use a mechanism of climate conscious empowerment shifting to achieve high levels of resilience. Demonstrating how beliefs about climate change complement other psychological attributes that impact entrepreneurs’ abilities to deal with adverse situations has important implications for entrepreneurship research and economic development policy.

Street-level quasi-bureaucracy and professional discretion: how transformational leadership and public service motivation influence village health volunteers' professional discretion

PurposeVillage health volunteers are community health volunteers in Thailand that have helped the government deliver public health services for many years, particularly during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Though labeled as “volunteers,” the village health volunteers are recruited, trained and supervised in a manner similar to how a government agency recruits, trains and supervises its street-level bureaucrats (SLBs). This study examines the two factors that affect how these street-level quasi-bureaucrats use their professional discretion: transformational leadership and public service motivation (PSM). Transformational leadership means a leadership style that develops, shares and sustains a vision to elevate SLBs to higher levels of performance, while PSM is defined as an SLB’s predisposition to make a difference by working in the public sector with a sense of calling. This study attempts to analyze the mediating role of psychological empowerment in the relationship between transformational leadership, PSM and professional discretion.Design/methodology/approachThe paper uses a three-wave survey-based quantitative method to avoid common method biases. This method provides evidence gathered from 105 subdistrict health promotion hospitals and 798 village health volunteers (VHVs) in five provinces in Thailand.FindingsPSM and transformational leadership influence the village health volunteers' use of professional discretion indirectly through the psychological empowerment mechanisms that make them feel positive toward their village health volunteer role and responsibility. The authors' findings suggest that the hospital directors' transformational leadership induces the village health volunteers' use of professional discretion by making them feel competent to do their work and feel fulfilled and valuable about their work. Similarly, the village health volunteers' PSM leads them to use professional discretion by making them feel fulfilled and valuable and by convincing them of the social and community impact of their work.Research limitations/implicationsWhile existing research focuses on VHVs' role in alleviating capacity constraints on the health care system, this study revealed an equally important role played by hospital directors. These directors' transformational leadership was instrumental in enhancing VHVs' psychological empowerment – particularly their perceptions of the meaning of their work and their competence – that ultimately enabled them to use professional discretion in their work. This study also highlighted the importance of VHVs' PSM, which leads to their use of professional discretion via the meaning and impact dimensions of psychological empowerment. Based on this study, PSM should also be incorporated into the community health volunteers' recruitment criteria. Also, public health agencies should consider including transformational leadership in the hospital directors' training programs and their promotion criteria.Practical implicationsAs VHVs' high-PSM level was found to enhance their professional discretion, the process of recruiting ordinary citizens to serve as community health volunteers should incorporate assessment of the candidates' PSM. Also, the Ministry of Public Health should design and assign tasks that citizen volunteers, particularly VHVs, consider meaningful and at which they feel competent.Social implicationsAside from technical training, directors of the subdistrict health promotion hospitals should regularly receive soft skill training (i.e. leadership training) and transformational leadership characteristics should be included in the government criteria for promotion.Originality/valueWhile past research has examined the impact of other leadership styles on psychological empowerment, this study took a further step by examining the mediating effects of psychological empowerment on the relationship between transformational leadership and professional discretion among VHVs. The authors analyzed the mechanism linking PSM to the VHVs' professional discretion. In addition, by examining the relative importance of different dimensions of psychological empowerment, this study offers a nuanced understanding of the psychological processes by which transformational leadership and PSM shape the SLBs' use of professional discretion in their work.

Collaboration as organizational empowerment: a network perspective

ABSTRACT Inter-organizational collaboration is central to Organizational Empowerment theory. It enables organizations to strengthen their capacity and to take collective action to achieve empowerment at multiple levels. Despite the growing significance of inter-organizational collaboration in addressing complex issues in our society, little is known about what facilitates or hinders collaboration between local organizations involved with community development in a neighborhood. By applying theories of organizational networks and Institutional Collective Action Framework (ICA), and Exponential Random Graph Modeling, this study analyzes the collaboration networks between 167 local organizations in Chicago in 2016. The results suggest that these local organizations are more likely to collaborate when they are the same type of organization and have a more diverse board of directors. It was also found that organizations built a bonding structure to cope with a challenging period for neighborhood organizations in Chicago. Overall, this study contributes to the understanding of empowerment literature by extending ICA and organizational network theories and a statistical approach to network analysis to describe mechanisms of organizational empowerment.

Research progress on the empowerment mechanism and effect of industrial internet

Research progress on the empowerment mechanism and effect of industrial internet

Research on the mechanism of deep empowerment of digital economy to real economy

Research on the mechanism of deep empowerment of digital economy to real economy

Community-based Empowerment: Unveiling patron-client Patterns in Voluntary Trader Partnerships for Enhanced Production in Desa Kolot, Cikalong Tasikmalaya

Enhancing production activities in Desa Kolot, Cikalong Tasikmalaya is achieved through mutually beneficial partnerships among traders, exemplifying a community-driven empowerment model. This approach is introduced as a response to counter the negative perceptions associated with interventionist empowerment strategies implemented by head of village. The objective of this research is to uncover the interconnected pattern involving traders with ample capital collaborating with those lacking financial resources. Employing a qualitative methodology with a phenomenological approach, the data analysis utilizes the patron-client theory. The study identifies the effectiveness of an empowerment model that optimizes the local potential of traditional snack production, deeply rooted in the community’s traditions. The empowerment mechanism is executed through voluntary connections established between major traders providing capital and smaller traders contributing culinary products. Small traders, as beneficiaries, get provision of materials, production tools, and skill enhancements offered by larger traders. Similarly, major traders benefit by gaining access to a market for the product of culinary, thereby expanding their customer base. These personal, voluntary, and tradition-bound relationships reflect dyadic connections characterized by an imbalance, potentially leading to domination and exploitation.

A multilevel investigation of the impact of error management culture on restaurant employee voice

PurposeThis study aims to examine the relation between error management culture and restaurant employee promotive and prohibitive voices. Drawing on socially desirable responding theory, the authors also propose a dual-mediation mechanism underlying the impact of error management culture on employee voice: psychological empowerment, as the agentic motive, and psychological safety, as the communal motive.Design/methodology/approachThe authors recruited 223 participants working in 37 restaurants in China for the two-wave surveys with a one-week interval. The authors use a multilevel modeling paradigm to test the study hypotheses.FindingsThis research examines a multilevel model suggesting that error management culture can boost employee promotive voice and prohibitive voice via the mechanisms of psychological safety and empowerment. In addition, the results suggest that psychological empowerment (vs psychological safety) has a strong mediation effect between error management culture and promotive voice, but the authors find no difference in mediating effects between error management culture and prohibitive voice.Practical implicationsRestaurants can encourage employee voice by developing and maintaining an error management culture. Organizations can also consider motivating employees from both agentic and communal perspectives. Moreover, managers should focus more on empowering employees in areas characterized by Confucianism or collectivism.Originality/valueThe current research adds to the voice literature by identifying an organizational cultural antecedent of employee voice–error management culture. Agentic and communal motives are two motivational paths of employee voice. It also extends the social desirability theory by highlighting the role of the agentic motive in the Chinese restaurant context.

Women and the Federation of Disability Organizations in Malawi: Experiences of Struggle and Solidarity

Women with disabilities are among the most marginalised members of the Federation of Disability Organizations in Malawi (FEDOMA), facing particular challenges related to sexual and gender‐based violence and family/home life; women with disabilities are both abused because of their embodied womanhood and denied many socially‐valued “traditional women’s roles.” However, women within Malawi’s disability rights movement transgress the boundaries of these social restraints. In this article, I share stories of women disability activists, drawn from an interview and participant observation‐based project, co‐designed with FEDOMA to explore the experiences of grassroots activists. In telling their stories, the women of FEDOMA detailed processes of empowerment and change, combatting their own and others’ experiences of violence, abuse, and exclusion. I discuss the ways in which women activists embodied roles that altered their communities and built activist networks, supporting one another in expressing agency, strength, and solidarity. Their work highlights a politics of care that emphasises the “traditional” and the “modern,” incorporating individualised human rights discourse into an ethics of community caring and expanding this collective inclusion to the oppressed and marginalised. In focusing on the experiences of Malawi’s women disability activists, we gain a more complex understanding of mechanisms of marginalisation, resistance, and empowerment.

The Field of Education in Reconstruction as the Consequence of COVID Pandemic Rebuilding Education? Mapping Landscapes of Changes in the COVID-19 Era

The pandemic outbreak in 2020 has influenced all aspects of social life. We focus on the education system and its impact on social (in)equality using Poland’s case to analyse them, through the notion of Bordieuan social field and knowledge-power relations. We claim that lockdown put into motion important processes or even systemic changes of education, by the emancipation and empowerment mechanism of social actors that aspire to be an active part of the educational field. In Poland, we deal with a static, centralized and hierarchic system. The time of pandemic made the field of education more dynamic. New actors were invited with the result that the power-knowledge relations changed. In this frame, we put the question about educational inequalities. We ask how the educational field is changing in face of the unforeseen and scarcely manageable global pandemic risk. Do they mean less in the global pandemic context or, on the contrary, are they strengthened?

Aesthetic transgression, writing pain, and the construction of female subjectivities: Joyce Ash’s Beautiful Fire

Joyce Ash’s Beautiful Fire focuses on womanhood and its thematization in multiple contexts. In this collection of poems, she presents a historical trajectory of the struggles of the woman for self-definition. Her exploration of the plight of womanhood sheds light on cultural stereotypes associated with such figuration as she seeks to contest and reconfigure female identity in new cultural and geo-political spaces. In this paper, I explore the meaning of the woman as writer as she ventures into forbidden masculine spaces and claims those spaces for herself. This sense of intrusion is indicative of female resistance and reinvention. I draw from the spirit of Ellen Kuzwayo’s biography Call Me Woman, incidentally the title of the first section of Ash’s collection, to establish a framework for analysis of the poems. I make the claim that the woman writer’s use of the pen to create new genres, the biography in verse, is a mechanism of resistance, self-definition and empowerment.

Investigate the Comprehensive Impact Mechanism of Leadership Empowerment on Employee Suggestions and its Management Strategies

Investigate the Comprehensive Impact Mechanism of Leadership Empowerment on Employee Suggestions and its Management Strategies

Impact of Digital Finance on Industrial Green Transformation: Evidence from the Yangtze River Economic Belt

Profound changes in information technology have resulted in the rapid development of the digital economy, digitalizing the financial sector and deepening green reforms. Consequently, digital finance has become an important driving force of green development. Using the entropy value method and the global super-efficiency slacks-based measure model, this paper measures the extent of digital finance and industrial green transformation in 108 prefecture-and-higher-level cities in the Yangtze River Economic Belt from 2011 to 2020. It empirically examines the effects and impact mechanisms of digital finance development on industrial green transformation based on the two-way fixed effects, mediated effects, and spatial econometric models. Digital finance can significantly drive industrial green transformation, and this finding remains robust to the exclusion of macro-systematic effects and robustness tests like the introduction of instrumental variables. Digital finance has a positive spatial spillover effect on industrial green transformation. Industrial structure upgrading and green technology innovation are the key ways in which digital finance impacts industrial green transformation; their respective mediating effect contribution rates are 18.70% and 20.93%. In the context of the impact of digital finance on industrial green transformation, significant heterogeneity was observed across regions, the administrative rank of cities, and the degree of developed traditional finance. Based on these conclusions, this paper presents policy recommendations like giving full play to digital finance’s green driving effect, optimizing digital finance’s green empowerment mechanism, implementing regional industrial green differentiated development based on local policies, and encouraging support for green innovation pilots.

Differential public support and the independence of anti-corruption agencies

AbstractSpecialized anti-corruption agencies (ACAs) aim to address corruption problems when conventional institutional mechanisms are dysfunctional. Yet, we still lack thorough understanding of the conditions that enable ACAs to withstand undue influences of the overarching political regime. Informed by the judicial politics literature, we examine the value of public opinion in empowering ACAs. Leveraging the evolving political conditions of Hong Kong, we argue that a lack of public support for other government organs offers opportunities for an ACA to distinguish itself from the rest of the regime and establish operational independence. We find that a signature ACA of Hong Kong, created by the British colonial government, has been uniquely sensitive to public complaints of corruption. The agency is the most responsive when other government branches are perceived to be lacking integrity. Also, negative appraisals of the political regime encourage the ACA’s institutional functions and increase the degree of enforcement discretion entrusted to it. Our findings suggest a mechanism of ACA empowerment whereby the public is committed to sustaining agency independence because of their distrust and the unpopularity of other government organs. Therefore, potential institutional threats posed by an unpopular regime to the ACA may actually strengthen the latter’s power and autonomy.

Retracted: Modeling the Empowerment Mechanism of Knowledge Collaboration from the Perspective of Platform Affordances

Retracted: Modeling the Empowerment Mechanism of Knowledge Collaboration from the Perspective of Platform Affordances

Can digital transformation enable the energy enterprises to achieve high-quality development?: An empirical analysis from China

In the context of China’s current “carbon neutrality” constraint, high-quality development of energy enterprises (HQDEE) is a win-win situation for both economic development and carbon reduction, and digital transformation may accelerate the achievement of its goals. To test the above hypothesis, this paper uses a two-way fixed effects model to estimate the association between digital transformation and HQDEE, based on a panel dataset of Chinese provinces from 2015–2021 and further explores their heterogeneous influence. In addition, we construct a threshold model to explore the enabling effect of digital transformation on HQDEE. The main results show that: (1) the HQDEE index is still in the “quantitative” stage of year-on-year improvement, while the digital transformation ability (DTA) is distributed in a stepwise incremental effect from west to east. (2) Digital transformation has a positive impact on HQDEE in China; in other words, a 1% increase in the digital transformation ability will boost HQDEE by an average of 0.3266%. And digital transformation can positively contribute to China’s HQDEE through the sub-indicators digital technology foundation, capital investment in digitalization, labor supply to digitalization, and digital transaction management, with digital technology base making the largest contribution. (3) The heterogeneity results show that the impact of digital transformation on HQDEE in China is more significant in the east, followed by the central region and the west region. (4) In terms of the empowerment mechanism, both sides of threshold value (0.7209), DTA has a significant empowering effect on HQDEE in China, and the empowerment effect is stronger when the DTA is higher than the threshold. We also provide policy insights for governments and scholars in related fields for reference.

Examination of the Mechanism of Fintech Empowerment in Commercial Banks Based on Text Mining

Against the backdrop of financial technology empowering the transformation of commercial banks, this paper uses panel data from 38 commercial banks in China between 2012 and 2020, and constructs a financial technology index using text mining techniques, to investigate the mechanism of fintech empowerment in commercial banks. The study found a significant positive "U" -shaped relationship between the level of bank fintech and profitability. The results of the examination indicate that fintech has a stronger positive impact on the profitability of small and medium-sized local state-owned banks, and that fintech affects bank profitability through risk-bearing, capital structure, and operational capabilities. This paper takes the risk-bearing ability, capital structure, and operational level of commercial banks as intermediate variables in the model, and controls for variables through macroeconomic environment and policy, and internal factors of commercial banks, to make the research results more convincing. This provides new research ideas for the study of systematic fintech theory and financial risk theory.

Can Communities Articulate a Solution? A Mixed Methods Study on Digital Mechanisms of Empowerment

Can Communities Articulate a Solution? A Mixed Methods Study on Digital Mechanisms of Empowerment

Dashboards as Mechanisms for Community Empowerment: Developing a Prototype for Child and Adolescent Well-being in California.

In recent years, stakeholders in public health have emphasized measuring young peoples' well-being as a more holistic and upstream approach to understanding their health and development. However, summarizing the available indicators of well-being in ways that strengthen ongoing policy and community efforts remains a challenge. Our objective was to develop a measurement framework of young peoples' well-being that would be engaging and actionable to a broad and diverse set of stakeholders in California. We began with a scan of the relevant literature documenting previous efforts to measure young peoples' well-being, both within the United States and internationally. Subsequently, we individually interviewed a set of key informants and then convened a multidisciplinary panel of experts to solicit feedback on our approach. Throughout this iterative and collaborative process, we developed and refined a measurement framework based on the information provided across these various sources. Findings suggest data dashboards are a promising approach for presenting a parsimonious yet holistic picture of young peoples' well-being. Dashboards can highlight well-being's multidimensionality by categorizing indicators over different domains. Our framework organizes indicators over 5 types: child-centric, subjective well-being, contextual determinants, developmental, and equity-focused. The design and flexibility of dashboards can also highlight important gaps in data collection that are of interest to end users such as indicators not yet collected among the broader population. Furthermore, dashboards can include interactive features, such as selecting key data elements, that can help communities articulate priority areas for policy action, thereby generating momentum and enthusiasm for future iterations and improvements. Data dashboards are well suited for engaging a variety of stakeholders on complex multidimensional concepts such as young peoples' well-being. However, to fulfill their promise, they should be codesigned and codeveloped through an iterative process with the stakeholders and community members they intend to serve.

Unmaking capitalism through community empowerment: Findings from Italian agricultural experiences

Capitalism – in the theorizations of sustainability transformation – has been largely taken for granted for its misleadingly assumed stability and homogeneity, thus limiting the scope for defining alternative futures, policy options and strategies for transformative change. Theorizations regarding sustainable transformative pathways have often overshadowed a nuanced landscape of normative and ontological pluralism thus contributing to generating techno-centric and top-down responses to issues such as access to food, farmers' control over the food-chain and global environmental change. The expansion of capital, under a mechanism of production-reproduction, with a constant attempt to subsume different forms of production into the global market, generates manifold temporal frictions that, on the one hand, contribute to the consolidation of the capitalist model and, on the other hand, give rise to conflicting elements and re-orientation of modernity in a process of “unmaking” of capitalism. This article, drawing upon empirical work conducted in Northern Italy, presents two experiences emerging from the scenario of local food networks, namely the “C’è Campo” Participatory Guarantee System and the “Ortazzo” Community Supported Agriculture project. These show elements and mechanisms of local community empowerment for unmaking capitalism from the inside, as steps for a sustainable and bottom-up transformation which do not necessarily imply the generation of socio-economic novelties ex-nihilo. The “conventionalization” of organic agriculture has pushed those actors who participate in local food networks to reconfigure their self-regulation towards a “bottom-up” approach driven by the adoption of PGS or CSA instruments as an attempt to secure or reacquire control over the market and the construction of quality. Convivial tools, in particular, are crucial for understanding - and finding responses to - the social, economic, cultural and environmental crisis that contemporary society is now facing.

Group counterattack to destination infringement events: media empowerment and emotional conduction regarding interactive ritual theory

ABSTRACT To explore the fomentation and diffusion process of tourism infringement incidents on social media, this study adopted an exploratory sequential mixed-method approach. Findings from in-depth interview and web text analysis indicated that destination crisis event on social media is fermented in three stages: emotional arousal, emotional interaction and emotional resonance. Further, quantitative research (PLS-SEM) yielded the impact of social norms, emotional motivation, ritual admission and emotional polarization on information empowerment, psychological empowerment and social empowerment, as well as the further reaction of tourist complaint and word-of-mouth (WOM). The current research contributes to the application and development of interaction ritual theory and empowerment theory in tourism field, and social media empowerment mechanism also provides inspiration for marketing and public opinion crisis management for tourism destinations.