Empowerment of marginalized convicted women through social enterprises
The European Union recently recognized “The empowerment of marginalized individuals” as one of the most relevant topics in modern societies. In its formal EU 2020 Strategy documents, the European Union listed “poverty, social exclusion and marginalization” as one of its main “Targets” and “inclusive growth” as one of its major “Priorities”. In 2011, the EU Commission adopted the Social Business Initiative (SBI), with the aim to promote the social enterprise as one of the most promising forms of entrepreneurial venture capable of dealing with this societal issue and fostering “inclusive growth”. However, the mechanisms by which the social enterprise may successfully allow the empowerment of marginalized individuals by economic driven solutions are not clear yet, and there is a lack of empirical works able to provide fine- grained/ micro-level evidences on this topic. Given these premises, I will commit this MSCA-IF research project to exploring the empowerment of convicted women, one of the most extremely marginalized category of individuals, using the perspective of social enterprise. I believe that a micro-level study of a successful case of social enterprises could reveal the critical factors behind the success or failure of these important initiatives, and from there, how they should be implemented.
I will finally address two main research objectives:
1) to investigate the micro-processes enacted by social enterprises, which successfully allow the empowerment of one of the most marginalized category of people: convicted women;
2) to compare the micro-processes enacted by social enterprises, which, in extreme cases of marginalization, allow them a) to bridge closed context of marginalization and the external environment, and b) to bridge the social and economic dimension.
Critical aspects of the project are: 1) its multidisciplinary nature and 2) the gender (women empowerment) related topic 3) extreme level of marginalization of convicted women.