Empowerment is an important and desirable state for employees within business enterprises around the world. Yet, the pursuit of empowerment across national boundaries may vary due to innate diferences within cultures. This may be particularly true with respect to choice of technologies for achieving empowerment. Using an interpretive field study of Fellows within the Japanese MITI and U.S. Depa...

Empowerment is a multidimensional social process that helps people gain control over their own lives. It is a process that fosters power (that is the capacity to implement) in people for use in their own lives, their own communities and in their own society, by acting on issues that they describe as important. Above all, empowerment is a result of participation in decision-making. Thenceforth, ...

There is growing interest in understanding of how User-Generated Content (UGC) empowers online consumer behavior. In this paper, we explore the relationships between Consumer Empowerment and Perceived Control (mediated by Self-Efficacy) over the decision making process using UGC. The results of this study reveal that Perceived Control has an influence on intention to use UGC. The findings also ...

OBJECTIVE E-health may enable the empowerment process for patients, particularly the chronically ill. However, e-health is not always designed with the requirements of patient empowerment in mind. Drawing on evidence-based e-health studies, we propose directions for best practices to develop e-health that promotes patient empowerment. METHODS The concept of patient empowerment in the Dutch se...

BACKGROUND In recent years, interventions and health policy programmes have been established to promote patient empowerment, with a particular focus on patients affected by long-term conditions. However, a clear definition of patient empowerment is lacking, making it difficult to assess effectiveness of interventions designed to promote it. The aim in this study was to develop a conceptual map ...

My purpose in writing this piece is to reflect upon a series of conversations in which I participated on the subject of empowerment over the past year. I believe that empowerment is key to innovation. For me, the essential aspect of the paper is my personal attempt to sort out why it is that employers, service providers and governments say they want to but do not reliably create empowerment in ...