Micro credit has been widely hailed as a new way of empowering poor women and promoting economic and social development. But Quotas for women in legislative or other elected bodies, despite being introduced in many countries worldwide from the 1990s onwards, have not attracted the same attention. Self –Help Group (SHG) is a homogeneous group of poor, women, users etc. This group is a voluntary one, formed on areas of common interest so that they can think, organize and operate for their own development. SHGs function on the basis of co-operative principles and provide a forum for members to extent support to each other. Women’s entry into local politics through the mandatory reservation system seems to be more important than the SHG programme in furthering women’s empowerment with lasting effects. The SHG scheme is a political programme, which requires active funding and vigorous NGOS to function well and is thus subject to political conjunctures that may fade away after the first enthusiasm. SHGS cater to the need of many households for short-term smaller loans at rates lower than those charged by traditional moneylenders. Larger loans for starting small businesses are given to much fewer women but are still important for the development of women’s self-employment in the local economy. Numerous SHGS have been started according to the statistics given by panchayat unions and NGOS, but many of them are new and it is an open question if they will function as well as the “model-groups ” with savings, repayment and “Profitable ” investments.

Abstract: The argument underlying this article is that innovative and skillful change strategies are needed in order to handle a range of complex and difficult societal issues. For many of these so-called wicked issues, conventional institutions and policies have performed rather poorly. It can

To date, the study of societal change in social and political psychology has been dominated by an intergroup relations research agenda. But in addition to intergroup dynamics, there are other major pathways to societal change and emancipation, which are almost never systematically considered

that experience as societal change agents themselves. The person who has discovered he can change what he doesn’t like in him-self may well seek to change that which he doesn’t like in his environ-ment as well. It will be recognized at once that I am speaking of a kind of thera-peutic experience that has as its

’un descendant d’ouvrier. L’écart a diminué de 20 points en vingt ans. En revanche, les descendants de non-salariés, et en particulier ceux des agriculteurs, ont de meilleures perspectives de revenu qu’auparavant. Au total, la hiérarchie des revenus selon l’origine sociale a peu changé mais s’est resserrée. Les

In this article I will critically examine Pentti Malaska's theory of societal change. This will be made with respect to his "funnel model " of society and the perspectives of the most commonly known theories on the macrolevel transformation of societies. The theories presented here

) of the social psychology of protest. This historical overview is substantiated with meta-analytical evidence on how these antecedents and methods changed over time. After the historical overview, we provide an empirical illustration of a longitudinal field study in a natural setting―a newly-built Dutch

 in an increasingly aggressive battle for control over information. The aim of this paper is  to  think critically about how  their positioning and  interests shape Chinese people’s understandings of mobile media,  and  trying  to answer  the question how has mobile media changed Chinese  people’s  information  dissemination,  political  participation  and  democratic

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We consider the problems of societal norms for cooperation and reputation when it is possible to obtain "cheap pseudonyms", something which is becoming quite common in a wide variety of interactions on the Internet. This introduces opportunities to misbehave without paying reputational