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Help For the piece of public art, see Empowerment (sculpture). For the Tibetan Buddhist practice, see
About Wikipedia Empowerment (Tibetan Buddhism).
Community portal Empowerment refers to increasing the spiritual, political, social, or Look up
Recent changes economic strength of individuals and communities. It often involves the empowerment in
Contact Wikipedia empowered developing confidence in their own capacities. Wiktionary, the free
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Contents [hide]
Print/export 1 Definitions
Languages 2 Marginalization and empowerment
Česky 3 The process of empowerment
Dansk 4 Workplace empowerment
Deutsch 5 Economics and empowerment
Eesti 6 References
Español 7 Notes
‫ﻓﺎﺭﺳﯽ‬ 8 See also
Français
Galego Definitions [edit]
한국어
The term empowerment covers a vast landscape of meanings, interpretations, definitions and disciplines
Italiano
ranging from psychology and philosophy to the highly commercialized self-help industry and motivational
Nederlands
日本語 sciences.

Polski Sociological empowerment often addresses members of groups that social discrimination processes have
Português excluded from decision-making processes through - for example - discrimination based on disability, race,
Suomi ethnicity, religion, or gender. Empowerment as a methodology is often associated with feminism: see
Svenska consciousness-raising.
Українська
中文 Marginalization and empowerment [edit]

This article does not cite any references or sources.

Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources.
Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2007)

"Marginalized" refers to the overt or covert trends within societies whereby those perceived as lacking
desirable traits or deviating from the group norms tend to be excluded by wider society and ostracized as
undesirables.

Sometimes groups are marginalized by society at large, but governments are often unwitting or enthusiastic
participants. For example, the U.S. government marginalized cultural minorities, particularly blacks, prior to
the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This Act made it illegal to restrict access to schools and public places based on
race. Equal opportunity laws which actively oppose such marginalization, allow increased empowerment to
occur. They are also a symptom of minorities' and women's empowerment through lobbying.

Marginalized people who have no opportunities for self-sufficiency become, at a minimum, dependent on
charity or welfare. They lose their self-confidence because they cannot be fully self-supporting. The
opportunities denied them also deprive them of the pride of accomplishment which others, who have those
opportunities, can develop for themselves. This in turn can lead to psychological, social and even mental
health problems.

Empowerment is then the process of obtaining these basic opportunities for marginalized people, either
directly by those people, or through the help of non-marginalized others who share their own access to these
opportunities. It also includes actively thwarting attempts to deny those opportunities. Empowerment also
includes encouraging, and developing the skills for, self-sufficiency, with a focus on eliminating the future
need for charity or welfare in the individuals of the group. This process can be difficult to start and to
implement effectively, but there are many examples of empowerment projects which have succeeded.
[citation needed]

One empowerment strategy is to assist marginalized people to create their own nonprofit organization, using
the rationale that only the marginalized people, themselves, can know what their own people need most, and
that control of the organization by outsiders can actually help to further entrench marginalization. Charitable
organizations lead from outside of the community, for example, can disempower the community by
entrenching a dependence on charity or welfare. A nonprofit organization can target strategies that cause
structural changes, reducing the need for ongoing dependence. Red Cross, for example, can focus on
improving the health of indigenous people, but does not have authority in its charter to install water-delivery
and purification systems, even though the lack of such a system profoundly, directly and negatively impacts
health. A nonprofit composed of the indigenous people, however, could insure their own organization does
have such authority and could set their own agendas, make their own plans, seek the needed resources, do
as much of the work as they can, and take responsibility - and credit - for the success of their projects (or
the consequences, should they fail).

Numerous critical perspectives exist that propose that an empowerment paradigm is present, Clark (2008)
showed that whilst there was a degree of autonomy provided by empowerment, it also made way for extended
surveillance and control, hence the contradiction perspective (Fardini, 2001).

The process of empowerment [edit]

The process which enables individuals/groups to fully access personal/collective power, authority and
influence, and to employ that strength when engaging with other people, institutions or society.

In other words, “Empowerment is not giving people power, people already have plenty of power, in the wealth
of their knowledge and motivation, to do their jobs magnificently. We define empowerment as letting this
power out (Blanchard, K)." It encourages people to gain the skills and knowledge that will allow them to
overcome obstacles in life or work environment and ultimately, help them develop within themselves or in the
society.

Empowerment includes the following, or similar, capabilities:-

The ability to make decisions about personal/collective circumstances

The ability to access information and resources for decision-making
Ability to consider a range of options from which to choose (not just yes/no, either/or.)
Ability to exercise assertiveness in collective decision making
Having positive-thinking about the ability to make change
Ability to learn and access skills for improving personal/collective circumstance.
Ability to inform others’ perceptions though exchange, education and engagement.
Involving in the growth process and changes that is never ending and self-initiated
Increasing one's positive self-image and overcoming stigma
Increasing one's ability in discreet thinking to sort out right and wrong
Workplace empowerment [edit]

One account of the history of workplace empowerment in the United States recalls the clash of management
styles in railroad construction in the American West in the mid-19th century, where "traditional" hierarchical
East-Coast models of control encountered individualistic pioneer workers, strongly supplemented by methods
of efficiency-oriented "worker responsibility" brought to the scene by Chinese laborers. In this case,
empowerment at the level of work teams or brigades achieved a notable (but short-lived) demonstrated
superiority[1]
Empowerment in the workplace is regarded by critics as more a pseudo-empowerment exercise, the idea of
which is to change the attitudes of workers, so as to make them work harder rather than giving them any real
power, and Wilkinson (1998) refers to this as "attitudinal shaping". However, recent research suggests that
the opportunity to exercise personal discretion/choice (and complete meaningful work) is an important
element contributing to employee engagement and well-being. There is evidence [2] that initiative and
motivation are increased when people have a more positive attributional style. This influences self-belief,
resilience when faced with setbacks, and the ability to visualize oneself overcoming problems. The implication
is that 'empowerment' suits some more than others, and should be positioned in the broader and wider context
of an 'enabling' work environment.

Empowerment to employees in the work place provides them with opportunities penda to make their own
decisions with regards to their tasks. Now-a-days more and more bosses and managers are practicing the
concept of empowerment among their subordinates to provide them with better opportunities.

In Management:

In the book Empowerment Takes More Than a Minute, the authors, Ken Blanchard, John P. Carlos, and Alan
Randolph, illustrate three simple keys that organizations can use to effectively open the knowledge,
experience, and motivation power that people already have. The three keys are that managers must use to
empower their employees are: share information with everyone, create autonomy through boundaries and
replace the old hierarchy with self-managed teams.

Share information with everyone – this is the first key to empowering people within an organization. By
sharing information with everyone, you are giving them a clear picture of the company and its current
situation. Another strong point that this brings is trust; by allowing all of the employees to view the company
information, it helps to build that trust between employer and employee. Create autonomy through boundaries
– this is the second key to empowerment which also builds upon the previous one. By opening
communication through sharing information, it opens up the feedback about what is holding them back from
being empowered. Replace the old hierarchy with self-managed teams – this is the third and final key to
empowerment which ties them all together. By replacing the old hierarchy with self-managed teams, more
responsibility is placed upon unique and self-managed teams which create better communication and
productivity. [3]

Economics and empowerment [edit]

In economic development, the empowerment approach focuses on mobilizing the self-help efforts of the poor,
rather than providing them with social welfare. Economic empowerment is also the empowering of previously
disadvantaged sections of the population, for example, in many previously colonized African countries[4].

References [edit]

Blanchard, Kenneth H., John P. Carlos, and Alan Randolph. Empowerment Takes More than a Minute.
San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1996. Print.

Thomas, K. W. and Velthouse, B. A. (1990) Cognitive Elements of Empowerment: An 'Interpretive' Model

of Intrinsic Task Motivation. Academy of Management Review, Vol 15, No. 4, 666-681.

Stewart, Aileen Mitchell. Empowering People (Institute of Management). London: Financial Times
Management, 1994. Print.
 Wilkinson, A. 1998. Empowerment: theory and practice. Personnel Review. [online]. Vol. 27, No. 1, 40-
56. Available from: Emerald on the World Wide Web:
http://hermia.emeraldinsight.com/vl=2601464/cl=84/nw=1/fm=docpdf/rpsv/cw/mcb/00483486/v27n1/s3/p40 .
Accessed February 16, 2004.

Notes [edit]

1. ^ views of Robert L. Webb

2. ^ Thomas and Velthouse, 1990
3. ^ Blanchard, Kenneth H., John P. Carlos, and Alan Randolph. Empowerment Takes More than a Minute. San
Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1996. Print.
4. ^ www.microempowering.org

See also [edit]

Decentralization
Self-ownership
Employee engagement
Youth empowerment
Black economic empowerment
Angela Rose

v•d•e Youth empowerment [show]

v•d•e Aspects of workplaces [show]

Categories: Sociology | Management | Buzzwords

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