As part of its seminar activity, the Markets, Culture and Ethics (MCE) Research Centre organizes the webinar series Empowering People starting in May 2022. The series, which is freely accessible, includes five (5) webinars which will take place online in May and June.
See below the list of upcoming webinars:
The phenomenon of marginalization is nowadays at the core of many reflections from different perspectives. Marginalization means disability: (a) from a human point of view, insofar marginalized people are not included in a context that enhances their potential; (b) from an economic point of view, insofar these people are excluded from economic value creation's contexts; finally, (c) from a political point of view, these people are excluded from having the right to make a choice.
Then, if marginalization refers to different states of disability, what does it mean to favour Empowerment? The concept of Empowerment is in the first place necessary to define the ability to make a choice with the awareness of one's agency value. However, empowerment can itself be understood as a process capable of enabling marginalized and disabled people to achieve this result.
Different research streams affirm this perspective: the stream that refers to the authors Naila Kabeer, the Nobel Prize for economics Amartya Sen, and Martha Nussbaum, who affirms the centrality of the person; the Community Psychology literature (Rappaport 1981), which in addition to emphasizing the centrality of the person, emphasizes the role of the community and the context as well, according to an ecological perspective. We speak of Empowering Organizations as those organizations capable of implementing enabling processes and spaces.
Surprisingly, however, these reflections have never been put in dialogue with other streams of literature, such as that of Social Business Hybrids (SBH). SBHs themselves are organizations that, thanks to business models' innovation, aim to make a social impact by addressing many of the same situations of disability, effectively promoting empowerment.
Social Business Hybrids are thus viewed as the archetype of Empowering Organization, that is, an organization capable of enabling people through market mechanisms. The market is here understood in a broad and noble sense, as a place of transcendence rather than mere profit. But if the market is an enabling social space, SBHs cannot ignore physical spaces to express their action. Combining the action of SBHs in physical and social spaces represents a challenge that deserves to be explored.
*This project has received funding from the EU's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant agreemnt No. 795925.
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