Civic participation in community life and within community organizations is generally considered as associated with positive outcomes for youth development and well-being. However, supportive empirical evidence on such benefits is still limited, as well as on the processes that may explain such positive outcomes. In this paper, we examined the impact of young people’s participation in different community and youth organizations on Social well-being, and the mediating role of Sense of community (SoC) and Empowerment. The sample comprised 835 adolescents and young adults, aged 16–26 years old (M = 20.8). 414 participants were males (49.6 %) and 421 participants were females (50.4 %). Results confirm that organizational membership of volunteer, youth, and religious associations significantly enhances Social well-being, both directly and through the mediation of SoC and Empowerment. Membership of leisure and recreational associations only marginally and indirectly affects Social well-being through the mediation of Empowerment.

We examine whether, and under which conditions, volunteering contributes to migrant integration. We identify two main goals of workfare volunteering—empowerment and employability—which build on two distinct images of the ideal citizen: the empowered citizen and the worker-citizen. Life story interviews were held with 46 first- and second-generation migrant women from Turkey, Morocco and Suriname living in the Netherlands. We found that volunteering contributes to employability and empowerment. However, for two mutually reinforcing reasons it eventually disempowers. Firstly, volunteering hardly ever results in paid employment because employers do not recognize volunteering as real work experience. Secondly, the focus on paid employment as ultimate form of integration misrecognizes migrant women as active citizens, which often results in disempowerment. Our findings show that the double policy goals of workfare volunteering require different conditions, and as such striving for both simultaneously often results in failing to achieve the set goals.

The objective of this study is to develop and test a conceptual model exploring the structural relationship between significant values and variables in volunteer management and corporate sponsorship in order to seek a potential link for corporate engagement in the support of volunteers for the development of volunteer management and retention strategies. We collected data from a sample of 470 volunteers who participated in the 28th Southeast Asian Games held in Singapore in 2015. We conducted a structural equation modeling to test the hypotheses of the conceptual model. The results show that person-task and person-organization fit enhance both volunteer retention and application value of employer branding through the serial mediation effect of empowerment and social capital. The findings imply that providing volunteers with opportunities for social capital experiences (e.g., trusty networks, social development, and cooperation; developing new relationships) can be efficient to ensure the sustainable volunteer management.

This paper contributes to the debate on the limited efficacy of civil society in Africa. It examines the complex interface between notions of civil society and citizenship within the context of the postcolonial state in Africa. It argues that the bifurcated character of citizenship is implicated in the inefficacy of civil society. This is underlined by the limited achievements in social citizenship, aggravated by the economic crisis and neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 1990s as well as the politics of regime sustenance. Political disengagement, drain on the moral content of public life and diminished collective orientation of citizens, aggravated conflicts within society, thereby, promoting a democratisation of disempowerment and a disorganised civil society.

The study examined positive and negative responses to volunteering (satisfaction with volunteering, perceived contribution to beneficiaries, and burnout) among 102 adolescents in Israel. The conceptual framework for explaining those responses was the ecological approach to the study of human development. In that context, the paper deals with the combined contribution of two ecological systems—the ontogenic system and the microsystem. The ontogenic system included sociodemographic variables (gender and religiosity), as well as empowerment resources. The microsystem included variables related to family context (parental volunteer activity and family support for volunteering), as well as to the context of volunteer activity (perceived rewards, difficulties with volunteering, and professional supervision). Sociodemographic variables and difficulties in relations with the provider organization predicted burnout, whereas rewards and professional supervision predicted satisfaction with volunteering. Empowerment contributed most to explaining volunteers’ perceived contribution to the beneficiaries of services.

Using Suchman’s taxonomy, the generation of legitimacy in relation to both external parties/stakeholders and employees by four Swedish work integration social enterprises (WISEs) was investigated. Data were collected through focus group and individual interviews. When operating in fiercely competitive markets, a pragmatic exchange legitimacy was mainly used. When selling complex products, such as investigations of work capacity, normative, and cognitive forms of legitimacy were common. As regards internal relations, normative legitimacy established though robust internal procedures was of importance. In addition, relational legitimacy when dealing with clients, funders, and employees emerged as important. The study indicates that WISEs tend to imitate profit-generating organizations in generating legitimacy. Although short-term resource-generation can be facilitated, the replication of for-profit practices can create a tension with the concurrent aim of being an innovative and empowering enterprise for people who otherwise would be excluded from the labor market.

In this paper, we supplement existing scholarship on the interactional process within volunteering with one that focuses on how inequality between volunteer and recipient of help is handled and (re)produced through interactions within voluntary groups. We focus on how empowerment projects with different interactional styles produce different forms of (in)equality on an interactional level despite dealing with very similar structural inequalities. We define interactional inequality as taking place along four dimensions: role distribution, framing rights, competencies, and sacrifice. Drawing on two different empowerment projects in the refugee solidarity movement in Denmark, we show how these dimensions of inequalities play out in the interaction between volunteers and refugees. We identify two strategies for overcoming the initial inequality between refugee and volunteer, one based on mutuality and another based on collectivity. Lastly, we show how these strategies produce interactional inequalities of their own.

Research on civic associations blurs an important distinction between the unfunded, informal, ongoing associations that theorists like de Tocqueville described versus current participatory democracy projects that are funded by the state and large nongovernmental organizations, are open to all, and are usually short-term. Based on a long-term ethnography of youth programs in the United States, this paper shows that entities like these, which participants and researchers alike often called “volunteer” or “civic” groups, operate very differently from traditional civic groups. The ethnography systematically details prevalent tensions that actors face when they try to cultivate the civic spirit in these increasingly typical organizations.

Volunteering research has long focused on the characteristics of volunteers and their motivations to highlight what drives them to dedicate their free time to good causes. More recently, researchers have turned their attention toward exploring the management practices that nonprofit organizations can implement to promote volunteers’ motivations and thereby improve their attitudes and performance. Our study contributes to this research by analyzing the extent to which combinations of human resource practices can be leveraged to influence volunteers’ level of engagement in their role. Survey results from 256 volunteers in five different nonprofit organizations in the Netherlands support our hypothesized model. Specifically, high-performance human resource practices are related positively to volunteer engagement, and volunteers’ organizational identification and psychological empowerment can account for a significant portion of variance in this relationship. Implications for research and the professional management of volunteers are discussed.

Women’s NGOs are key players in the struggle to gain gender equality around the world. Motivated by a concern about the lack of progress in achieving gender equality on a global scale, the purpose of the study was to investigate the agendas and conceptualizations of women’s NGOs for gaining gender equality, and to find out to what extent they identified with feminist strategies for social change. This paper is focused on the intersection of how women’s NGOs conceptualise and deliver action towards gender equality and why gender inequality is still a major global social problem. The key mechanism for inquiry in this paper is the interrogation of how the concept of ‘empowerment’ in contemporary gender equality policies and programs, which are largely carried out by women’s NGOs, has emerged as a possible counter force to achieving gender equality. Given that ‘empowerment’ frames contemporary gender equality policy at all levels of governance (local, national and global), the study explored its impact on the progress of achieving gender equality from the women’s NGO perspective. The survey data revealed tensions between the wide range of feminist agendas of the NGOs and the limitations of the current empowerment paradigm. These tensions are between predominantly individualised empowerment processes and the much broader structural and other feminist objectives of how the NGOs understood gender equality as a concept and about how it could be achieved in practice.

The paper explores the impact of microfinance on multidimensional constructs of empowerment and the catalysts thereof. The reference point for analysis in the paper is the women microfinance borrowers’ self perception about their life transmutation as well as that of household power configuration. Unlike other recent research papers on the topic that focus on women’s economic empowerment, this paper focuses on both economic and socio-cultural empowerment. The paper is based on both primary and secondary data. Qualitative primary data were collected from women beneficiaries of microfinance in Bangladesh. This paper argues that microfinance can be a useful empowerment tool that can transmute women’s economic position and power relationships, but only when combined with financial literacy. It concludes that financial literacy is more important than access to credit and should be the focus of all future microfinance programs.

This article introduces the first of two international Themed Collections on gender and work, published as, Part A across Volumes 35(4) and 36(2), and as Part B in Volume 36(3) of The Economic and Labour Relations Review. In introducing the 11 Part A articles, we identify three main themes: contexts, impacts, and effects on gender status. Contexts include climate crisis, uncertain gender impacts of artificial intelligence (AI), and ongoing skill under-recognition in feminised ‘ancillary’ occupations. Impacts include increasing care load and violence in traditionally feminised teaching work, LGBTQ+ workers’ intertwined experiences of stigmatisation and job insecurity, and immigrant experience of unregulated care work in private households. Impacts on well-being, safety, and security include restricted access to nutrition, rest, creativity, life cycle, and community participation, and diminished status, agency, voice, and recognition of productivity contribution. An alternative productivity calculus is provided in articles documenting the benefits of Australia’s universal statutory 10 days’ family and domestic violence leave entitlement, a proposed Indian green jobs guarantee programme that could transition millions of women into the formal labour market, and an Australian calculation of the unrecognised GDP contribution of breastmilk. A Sub-Saharan African article shows that legally mandated maternity protections are inaccessible to women in informal labour markets. In the context of the United Nations’ key normative and programme role, and its stocktakes of equality and empowerment milestones, we foreshadow questions of official structure and grassroots agency to be addressed in the Part B exploration in (Volume 36(3)) of informal economy work, community agency, and intersectional voice.

Globally, gender equality is the next frontier for social transformation, and women’s economic empowerment is promoted as the pathway to achieve this goal, particularly in countries of the Global South. Women’s economic empowerment is broadly defined as women’s capacity to contribute to, and benefit from, economic activities on terms that recognise the value of their contributions. Advocates for women’s economic empowerment state that it has the potential to be a safeguard against poverty and precarity by enhancing women’s wellbeing. Using a critical-feminist lens, we explore the benefits and risks of the global trend towards women’s economic empowerment. After providing an overview of the evolution of the concept of empowerment, we review the benefits of women’s economic empowerment: economic growth, improved rates of tertiary education and market participation for women, and growth of women’s autonomy. We then examine the risks of the global focus on women’s economic empowerment, which we distil into three key areas: (a) women seen as a country’s ‘natural resource’, used as instruments for economic prosperity and reproduction without considering their wellbeing; (b) a focus on women’s market participation without adequately factoring in current labour market realities; and (c) pushing the women’s economic empowerment agenda forward without fully considering the scope of unpaid reproductive work undertaken by women. We conclude with an analysis of how UN Women (2024) is shifting the agenda by providing a holistic framework for thinking about women’s economic empowerment. We suggest that there is room for cautious optimism if this framework is widely adopted.