Chapter 2: Addressing the Challenges of Empowering Rural Women, can Holistic Leadership and Corporate Social Responsibility Help?

From the Book: The Refractive Thinker®: Vol. VII: Social Responsibility

Summary

he abuse of leadership within many of our organizations around the world has created a demand for more integrated leadership, which is inclusive, transparent, more balanced, and socially responsible. This inquiry is presented to review some of the challenges to empowering rural women worldwide, a generally poor and disenfranchised group. A need exists for a more holistic leadership combined with corporate social responsibility (CSR) to create a successful win-win strategy for businesses to help address developmental needs.
Equity, in the form of access to quality education demands recognition of the obstacles faced by different groups of people. Literacy for example, involves negotiated groups of social practices that operate within a local and global context, conceptualized differently in diverse environments. Literacy in the larger context must be examined based upon the dynamics of globalization and informational labor, shaped by education and requisite literacies to ensure productive and rewarding labor in a global, informational economy.
Certain dynamic aspects to globalization pressure cultures and economies to restructure themselves. CSR has been analyzed through a range of different instruments, such as localized firm specific initiatives; codes of conduct and global agreements; macro-level policy interventions; a wealth of marginalized groups; resource poor farmers, all cases from private sector businesses around the world. CSR was never created to address societal ills; however, it may offer a plausible framework to do just that with focus on human needs and how cultural, social, political, and economic factors influence business contributions.