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This paper is written as a reply to the paper “Applying empowerment: organizational model” written by Baruch. The paper argues that Baruch’s account of empowerment, in spite of its attempts to educate managers actually works to obscure understanding. Mounting a challenge to Baruch a three‐fold critique is developed. Examining the treatment of history, process and context in Baruch’s work, this paper concludes that Baruch’s analysis lacks, rejects or mis‐reads a range of contextual and conceptual issues which should be of central importance.

The social inclusion of immigrants has been a central public policy issue in European countries, and entrepreneurship is often promoted as a form of integration. Female immigrants face double discrimination of gender and ethnicity while becoming entrepreneurs. The aim of the paper is to investigate the female empowerment in the host country as a predictor of immigrant women engagement in entrepreneurship.

Based on panel data for European Union countries for years 2006–2021, female immigrant entrepreneurship was modelled by the impact of variables showing the empowerment of women in host countries. Data availability was the determinant regarding the inclusion of 22 countries: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden were all in the research sample.

Although immigrant entrepreneurship is highly context-oriented and locale-specific (as in the physical setting for relationships among people), some universal patterns for a group of countries are found. A stronger political and managerial position of power for the women in host countries encourages female immigrant entrepreneurship, while the gender pay gap is statistically insignificant.

The originality of the paper is due to the multi-country level and female-focused research perspectives in immigrant entrepreneurship. The study refers to the intersectionality of gender and ethnicity, arguing that the empowerment of women in host countries affects female immigrant entrepreneurship at the macro-level.

This paper aims to identify the mechanism through which consumer empowerment, created via the Facebook brand page (FBBP), is transformed into brand page stickiness. Specifically, a model examining the mediating role of FBBP experience and the moderating role of brand love is proposed and tested.

Data from 283 FBBP users were analyzed using structural equation modeling with partial least squares.

The findings reveal the positive effect of consumer empowerment and brand page experience on brand page stickiness. The mediating role of brand page experience and the moderating role of brand love were prominent in the consumer empowerment–brand page stickiness link.

This paper is novel in inaugurating the association between consumer empowerment and FBBP stickiness, which is mediated by brand experience and moderated with brand love. This paper enriches the understanding of how brand page stickiness can be enhanced in the social media context.

This paper guides managers to best utilize FBBP to create a pleasant experience and yield stickiness.

Previous studies have examined the empowerment of individual teachers, while neglecting the fact that such a phenomenon might grow within a team. Building on the crossover model and social exchange theory, the aim of this study is to explore whether team empowerment among school management teams (SMTs), is transmitted to the school level and affects schoolteachers' job satisfaction and thereby schoolteachers' organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Furthermore, we explored whether those relationships are moderated by team-member exchange (TMX) relationships.

Data were collected from 86 principals, 357 SMT members and 683 schoolteachers from 86 schools.

Results confirmed the mediating role of schoolteachers' job satisfaction, showing a positive relationship between SMT empowerment and schoolteachers' job satisfaction, and between job satisfaction and OCB. The moderation of TMX and the overall moderated mediation hypotheses were not supported.

The nature of data collected in the current study precludes any inference concerning the direction of casual links among the study constructs. Therefore, longitudinal studies could be designed, aimed at confirming the direction of links among the variables.

The findings reinforce the impact of schoolteachers' job satisfaction on achieving OCBs. Hence, SMT members carry the responsibility to cultivate satisfied schoolteachers through schools' support mechanisms and guidance in order to achieve schoolteachers' OCB.

The study identifies SMT empowerment as a key factor that may indirectly encourage schoolteachers to invest in OCBs through positive attitudes of schoolteachers' job satisfaction.

We explore how NGO’s local entrepreneurial initiatives to empower women entrepreneurs can compensate for weak state policies for women in a context of male-dominated socio-cultural norms.

We use the case of a local entrepreneurial initiative launched in the Atlas region of Morocco, the Empowering Women in the Atlas Initiative (EWA). We collected data through 51 semi-structured interviews of women entrepreneurs in three cooperatives which exploit the natural resources of their region to establish a social venture. Our data are longitudinal as they were collected at two time periods: before and after the initiative.

The findings of this study suggest that local entrepreneurial initiatives can have a significant impact on rural women entrepreneurs’ empowerment. The improved perception of empowerment has not only helped them develop capacities to leverage the business opportunities linked to the natural resources of their region, but it has also increased their status and role within their family and community.

We make recommendations for policymakers to encourage this type of initiative to compensate for the absence of supporting policies geared toward women.

Our study is one of the first to look at empowerment as a policy instrument to develop women entrepreneurial activities in rural areas of developing countries. Our paper uses a unique hierarchical perspective and a multidimensional framework for analyzing social cooperative ventures and rural women entrepreneurs’ empowerment. Our paper unravels interesting insights for women entrepreneurs’ narration strategies.

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought unexpected implications for the world of work, accelerating the use of digital technologies and hybrid workspaces, and posing new questions on how to manage working relationships. This chapter explores whether employee empowerment experiences can ensure better work-life connections. Empowerment involves a permanent transfer of power from the line manager to the employee. Although not all line managers are willing to use it as a development tool for fear of seeing their role downsized, research has been conducted to better understand the empowerment experiences of Generation Z employees, identifying positive and negative aspects of the relationship with their line managers. Generation Z employees have certain expectations when it comes to their job that are not always met, and understanding and managing these expectations through empowerment has great value to shape the future of organizations and create a better work-life connection for upcoming generations of workers. The chapter adopts a new conceptual framework for understanding employees’ empowerment experiences, proposes specific structural actions that line managers can take and reflects on the implications of employee empowerment for the HR function in terms of work-life interface.

The study finds the determinants of women empowerment measured in terms of domestic decision-making in a developing economy perspective by considering rural women in India. Women empowerment simply means giving opportunities to women to enable them to be socially and financially independent. Empowerment of women through investment in their education and health has a positive effect on economic growth. Almost 70% of Indian population lives in rural areas. If women in these areas are educated and empowered, they can contribute to the economic growth either directly or indirectly by improving health and education of the future generations. This study indicates that an employed woman, having her own income source, higher educational level, knowledge of legal rights, higher educational level of the mother of the woman, having property in her own name, more freedom of movement during her school days, having high self-esteem and belonging to a relatively affluent background, increases domestic making power of the women, and thus empowerment. Some possible policies are suggested for developing economies.

Research on online user privacy shows that empirical evidence on how privacy literacy relates to users' information privacy empowerment is missing. To fill this gap, this paper investigated the respective influence of two primary dimensions of online privacy literacy – namely declarative and procedural knowledge – on online users' information privacy empowerment.

An empirical analysis is conducted using a dataset collected in Europe. This survey was conducted in 2019 among 27,524 representative respondents of the European population.

The main results show that users' procedural knowledge is positively linked to users' privacy empowerment. The relationship between users' declarative knowledge and users' privacy empowerment is partially supported. While greater awareness about firms and organizations practices in terms of data collections and further uses conditions was found to be significantly associated with increased users' privacy empowerment, unpredictably, results revealed that the awareness about the GDPR and user’s privacy empowerment are negatively associated. The empirical findings reveal also that greater online privacy literacy is associated with heightened users' information privacy empowerment.

While few advanced studies made systematic efforts to measure changes occurred on websites since the GDPR enforcement, it remains unclear, however, how individuals perceive, understand and apply the GDPR rights/guarantees and their likelihood to strengthen users' information privacy control. Therefore, this paper contributes empirically to understanding how online users' privacy literacy shaped by both users' declarative and procedural knowledge is likely to affect users' information privacy empowerment. The study empirically investigates the effectiveness of the GDPR in raising users' information privacy empowerment from user-based perspective. Results stress the importance of greater transparency of data tracking and processing decisions made by online businesses and services to strengthen users' control over information privacy. Study findings also put emphasis on the crucial need for more educational efforts to raise users' awareness about the GDPR rights/guarantees related to data protection. Empirical findings also show that users who are more likely to adopt self-protective approaches to reinforce personal data privacy are more likely to perceive greater control over personal data. A broad implication of this finding for practitioners and E-businesses stresses the need for empowering users with adequate privacy protection tools to ensure more confidential transactions.

The embedding of digital technology and the fuzzy organizational boundary have changed the operation of platform innovation ecosystem (PIE). Specifically, as an important energy of PIE, the internal logic of knowledge flow needs to be reconsidered in the context of digital age, which will be helpful to select the cultivation and governance strategy of PIE.

A dual case-analysis is applied to open the “black box” of knowledge flow in the PIE from the perspective of enabled by digital technology, by taking the intellectual property (IP) operation platform as cases.

The research findings are as follow: (1) The knowledge flow mechanism of PIE is mainly demonstrated through the processes of knowledge acquisition, knowledge integration and knowledge spillover. During this process, connectivity empowerment and scenario empowerment realize the digital empowerment of the platform. (2) Connectivity empowerment provides a channel of knowledge acquisition for the digital connection between participants in PIE. In the process of knowledge integration, scenario empowerment improves the opportunities for accurate matching and collaborative innovation between knowledge supplier and demander, and enhance the value of knowledge. The dual effect of connectivity empowerment and scenario empowerment has accelerated the knowledge spillover in PIE. Particularly, connectivity empowerment expands the range of knowledge spillover, and scenario empowerment affects the generativity of the platform, resulting in the enhancement of platform’s capability to embed and expand its value network. (3) Participants have been benefitted from the PIE enabled by digital technology through three key modules (knowledge acquisition, knowledge integration and knowledge spillover), as the result of knowledge flow.

This study focuses on the knowledge flow mechanism of PIE enabled by digital technology, which enriches the PIE theory, and has enlightenments for the cultivation of digital platform ecosystem.

In 1995, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) launched the quantitative Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) in its Human Development Report (1999). The GEM has been a feature of this report ever since. In 2004/05, a group of researchers from Edith Cowan University (Perth, Australia) intended to rely on the GEM to study the experiences of factory women in two of Sri Lanka's Export Processing Zones (EPZs). The experience of this team – at the heart of this chapter – is that the quantitative measures of the GEM, particularly the specific ways in which it causes researchers to conceptualise gender and empowerment, are not adequate to understand the nuanced and complex processes of women's experiences in regards to empowerment. The team's experience caused it to question the relevance and utility of the GEM, and in turn, its sole reliance on a quantitative methodology. As a result, the researchers from Edith Cowan changed their original methodological approach and adopted a stronger qualitative emphasis. In turn, this provided a far more realistic insight into the concepts of gender and empowerment, and indeed the lived experiences of the women it sought to represent.