Welfare and Planning
Reza Zare; Mohammad Safari Dashtaki
Abstract
It is generally accepted that women and girls are more vulnerable to the exploitation, poverty, violence and malnutrition than men. They have less opportunity for education and training. Social entrepreneurship gives women the opportunity to control their own destinies. It allows women enjoy greater ...
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It is generally accepted that women and girls are more vulnerable to the exploitation, poverty, violence and malnutrition than men. They have less opportunity for education and training. Social entrepreneurship gives women the opportunity to control their own destinies. It allows women enjoy greater independency, empowerment and social participation than the traditional and state-owned investments. The present study aimed to provide a social entrepreneurship model with an approach to empowerment of female household heads in the Imam Khomeini Relief Foundation and identification and explanation of effective factors in the formation of this process and its consequences through applying a qualitative research method and the Grounded Theory (GT) strategy. In this regard, interviews were conducted with eighteen university experts and family workers from Imam Khomeini Relief Foundation in Fars province as the statistical sample using a semi-structured theoretical and purposive method. The interview results were analyzed in three stages namely the open, axial and selective coding. According to obtained results, empowering policies create the social entrepreneurship and the phenomenon orientation in the interaction with other factors. Relationships of these factors are shown in the final model of research. Capacity-building, physical-psychological boosting and supportive laws have significant effects on the creation of empowering policies. This attitude ultimately becomes a basis for the emergence of social entrepreneurship phenomenon.
Rural Development
Seyed Ahmad Firouzabadi; Hossein Imani Jajarmi; Hamideh Dabbaghi
Abstract
Nowadays, social entrepreneurship in the form of different organizational structures (profit, non-profit, or combination, charities, cooperatives, joint-stock companies, businesses, unions) creates social value. The cooperatives play an expanding role in the society and the number of women as their ...
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Nowadays, social entrepreneurship in the form of different organizational structures (profit, non-profit, or combination, charities, cooperatives, joint-stock companies, businesses, unions) creates social value. The cooperatives play an expanding role in the society and the number of women as their member is increasing. This research is to investigate whether rural women's cooperatives in Iran, considering they are a combination of both private and public sectors, can be a platform for social entrepreneurship. We have analyzed eight interviews rural women as members of a rural women's cooperative and the text of law about cooperative companies. Moreover, we have applied grounded theory as our method and the MAX QDA as a software to analyze qualitative data. The results of this research show that 438 semantic terms were extracted and categorized into 5 categories of clusters, 16 main themes, and 42 sub-themes. During the establishment of a cooperative in 2011, there have been two kinds of capital-financial facilities, human capital and knowledge. The nature of the created business in the cooperative has addressed rural women as the community and their problems as social problems. Analysis of the social problems shows that this cooperative has initially intended to create job for the entrepreneurs and secondly to solve the local economic problems of women, especially those as the head of the household. The Entrepreneurship Environment in the rural women's cooperatives (Mehr Afarin Eram) consists of four main factors: entrepreneurs, rural women as local community, special aspects in social, cultural, economic and legal contexts, as well as the obstacles against the cooperatives. Strategies of these cooperatives are formed via current strategies like training part, human resource management, financial, production and sales as well as development strategies in the future. Additionally, the achievements and outcomes of the cooperatives shows that Mehr Afarin Eram can empower women, create objective and subjective values, and achieve financial success.
