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The measurement of women's economic welfare and exploring its underlying factors have been undervalued in the context of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. This study addressed this gap by focusing on assessing women's subjective economic welfare and its socioeconomic and cultural determinants in the education and health sectors within Mardan, Northern Pakistan.

The study used stratified random sampling techniques for the selection of sample respondents and collected data through a well-structured questionnaire. To measure women’s economic welfare, the study utilizes Lorenz curves, the Gini index, the Sen Social Welfare function and an individual's gross monthly income. Furthermore, the ordinary least squares method was utilized to analyze the determinants of economic welfare.

The findings show greater income inequality and a lower welfare level for women in the education sector compared to the health sector. Likewise, the study identifies several key determinants, such as age, educational qualification, job experience, respect for working women, outside and work-place problems and the suffering of family members of working women for their economic well-being.

This study makes valuable contributions to the literature by focusing on the cultural perspective of Pakhtun women in Mardan and providing a context-specific understanding of subjective economic welfare. Additionally, the authors collected first-hand data, which gave an original outlook on working women's current economic welfare level. Furthermore, this study undertakes a comparative analysis of working women's welfare in the health and education sectors. This comparison offers a more accurate portrayal of the challenges and opportunities specific to these occupations.

The peer-review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-04-2023-0246

Female smallholder farmers in low-income countries face barriers to accessing capital and commodity markets. While agricultural cooperatives provide services that contribute to the income and productivity of small-scale producers, evidence of cooperatives' social and economic empowerment of female smallholders remains limited. We apply Sen's capability approach to female entrepreneurs' socioeconomic empowerment to examine whether women's participation in a coffee and microfinance cooperative from rural western Uganda benefits their social and economic position within their household. First, we study the relationship between women's cooperative participation and their household coffee sales and savings. Second, we investigate the link between women's cooperative participation and their intra-household decision-making and whether the inclusion of the husband in his wife's cooperative strengthens or lowers women's decision-making power.

We carry out a case study of a hybrid coffee and microfinance cooperative that promotes social innovation through the integration and empowerment of female smallholders in rural Uganda. Using a cross-sectional survey of 411 married female cooperative members from 26 randomly selected self-help groups of Bukonzo Joint Cooperative and 196 female non-members from the identical area, employing propensity score matching, this paper investigates the benefits of women's participation in a coffee and microfinance cooperative in the Rwenzori Mountains of western Uganda. We present and discuss the results of our case study within an extensive literature on the role of institutions in collective action for women's empowerment.

Our findings provide new empirical evidence on female smallholders' participation in mixed cooperatives. Our results indicate that women's participation in microfinance-producer cooperatives appears to be a conditional blessing: even though membership is linked to increased women's intra-household decision-making and raised household savings and income from coffee sales, a wife with a husband in the same cooperative self-help group is associated with diminished women's household decision-making power.

The focus of this study is on female coffee smallholders in an agricultural cooperative in rural western Uganda. In particular, we focus on a case study of one major coffee cooperative. Our cross-sectional survey does not allow us to infer causal interpretations. Also, the survey does not include variables that allow us to measure other dimensions of women's empowerment beyond decision-making over household expenditures and women's financial performance related to savings and income from coffee cultivation.

Our empirical results indicate that female smallholders' cooperative membership is associated with higher incomes and coffee sales. However, husband co-participation in their wives' cooperative group diminishes wives' decision-making, which suggests that including husbands and other family members in the same cooperative group may not be perceived as an attractive route to empowerment for female smallholders. For these reasons, an intervention that encourages the cooperation of both spouses and that is sensitive to context-specific gender inequalities, may be more successful at stimulating social change toward household gender equality than interventions that focus on women's autonomous spheres only.

While the literature thus far has focused on microfinance's potential for women's empowerment, evidence on agricultural cooperatives' affecting women's social and economic position is limited. First, our findings provide novel empirical evidence on the empowering effects of women's participation in a self-help group-based coffee cooperative in rural Uganda. Second, our data allows us to explore the role of husbands' participation in their wives' cooperative and SGH. We embed our hypotheses and empirical results in a rich discussion of female entrepreneurship, microfinance and cooperative literature.

The purpose of this paper is to connect emerging conceptions of childhood in the capabilities approach (CA) literature to models of self-directed education in hopes of articulating and defending the educational goal of promoting children's participative capabilities.

This paper offers a conceptual and theoretical exploration of childhood from a CA perspective and seeks to connect it to self-directed education.

The author argues that self-directed education, especially democratic schools in the model of the Sudbury Valley School, is well-suited to the task of promoting children's participative capabilities and that people should, therefore, consider this the kind of education to which children have a right.

By applying the CA framework to self-directed education, this paper makes an original contribution in two directions: first, it offers a new set of theoretical tools for self-directed education scholars; second, it offers capabilities theorists interested in promoting children's participative capabilities with a new model of education.

This paper aims to contribute to research on hybrid organisations operating within the information and communication technology for development paradigm to foster socio-economic inclusion through the capacity building of marginalised individual youth to enable their entry and participation in the formal labour market.

Using a qualitative research design, the authors investigated impact sourcing service providers and their beneficiaries to unpack how hybrid organisations fulfil their social mission and to provide a nuanced understanding of their needed capabilities. Data triangulation through document analysis, participant observation and semi-structured interviews were conducted for the empirical findings’ robustness and in-depth analysis.

This paper illuminates how hybrids strived to build beneficiaries' capabilities through empirically grounded approaches of “standardised” and “individualised” skills development, which were strongly connected to the perceived capabilities among the beneficiaries. Organisations that practiced the “individualised” approach imparted technical knowledge and, depending on individual needs, relevant social skills. Critically, the empirical findings call into question the effectiveness of the scalability model, as the results showed that the creation of standardised, low-skilled and low-paid jobs contradicts the idealised self-help status that employment advocates. In addition, the findings underline the central role of constant experimentation, resilience and organisational learning in revamping capabilities of hybrid organisations. Remarkably, compared to organisations committed to the “standardised” technical competency path, the results underscored the difficulties that organisations taking an “individualised" approach face in developing organisational capabilities for their financial sustainability. Further, organisations engaged in standardised” skills development were found to readapt their business model to the economic value and kept the wording of dual mission as a narrative.

The paper makes a conceptual and empirical contribution bringing together two separately developed literature strands – the organisational capability approach and – the individual capability approach, to enhance a more profound understanding of how both capabilities are connected to each other in the dual-mission orientation of hybrids embedded in resource-poor environments, global value chains, Global South, hybrid organisations, organisational and individual capability building.

The present chapter attempts to highlight the vulnerabilities of female migrants as compared to non-migrants in the unorganized urban labor market. Informal female migrants working in construction, as domestic workers, tailors/boutiques, and garment workers in the urban unorganized sector of Uttar Pradesh’s selected urban locations, are covered in this chapter. Though the fact prevails that workers in the unorganized labor markets are confronted with various livelihood crunches, still those who are migrants and swelling the urban labor markets are more prone to different vulnerabilities. There is scanty literature on the situation and condition of migrants particularly female migrant workers in India, whereas we know more about the condition of international migrants, mainly migrant workers in the Gulf and other regions. The study is based on interviews with 174 female informal workers who have migrated and 222 non-migrants from various regions of the state to the urban locations of selected cities. Our study also attempts to do an in-depth, qualitative exploration of these vulnerable women’s lives and perceptions and tries to capture layered vulnerabilities, risks, and rewards confronted due to both migration and work in the informal sector. Specifically, the findings reflect upon the fact that how strong societal norms may actually prevent women from acknowledging or articulating the true reasons for their migrations.

Facilitated by social media, employee activism is on the rise, often in response to organizations' own socially irresponsible behavior. Given that digital employee activism is a vital yet underexplored research arena, the purpose of this study is to propose and test a theoretical model for understanding this phenomenon.

A survey was launched on Dynata, a US-based consumer panel company. A total of 657 representative full-time employees working at different levels of positions participated the survey to indicate their perceptual and behavioral responses to organizational social irresponsibility.

Moral obligation was a significant factor in mediating the relationship between organizational social irresponsibility and digital employee activism. Ideological psychological contract adds supplemental weights moderating the mediation effect on digital employee activism.

This study, based on social regulation theory, explores the rise of employee activism in response to organizations’ socially irresponsible behavior. The study identifies moral obligation and ideological psychological contract as the driving forces behind digital employee activism. This study advances digital employee activism scholarship by incorporating the normative lens of moral obligation and ideological psychological contract.

Using political corporate social responsibility (PCSR) as a theoretical framework, this study aims to examine how multinational corporations (MNCs) can function as nonstate actors in public diplomacy efforts during the Russia–Ukraine war.

A thematic analysis using qualitative content analysis was conducted on 98 new releases from the websites of the top 50 MNCs listed in the Fortune Global 500.

The findings indicate that MNCs elucidate their initiatives aimed at providing a secure environment for war victims through their news releases, with notable variations in responses based on the companies' geographical location. MNCs also mentioned strengthening the power of public authorities by rebalancing power dynamics between governments and intergovernmental initiatives under war conditions.

This study is one of the first empirical investigations to research corporate diplomacy and explore the theoretical implications of PCSR for corporate diplomacy.