Empowerment

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For the piece of public art, see Empowerment (sculpture). For the Tibetan Buddhist
practice, see Empowerment (Tibetan Buddhism).

Look up empowerment in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Empowerment refers to increasing the spiritual, political, social, or economic strength of

individuals and communities. It often involves the empowered developing confidence in
their own capacities.

Contents
[hide]

• 1 Definitions
• 2 Marginalization and empowerment
• 3 The process of empowerment
• 4 Workplace empowerment
• 5 Economics and empowerment
• 6 References
• 7 Notes

• 8 See also

[edit] Definitions
The term empowerment covers a vast landscape of meanings, interpretations, definitions
and disciplines ranging from psychology and philosophy to the highly commercialized
self-help industry and motivational sciences.

Sociological empowerment often addresses members of groups that social discrimination

processes have excluded from decision-making processes through - for example -
discrimination based on disability, race, ethnicity, religion, or gender. Empowerment as a
methodology is often associated with feminism: see consciousness-raising.

[edit] Marginalization and empowerment

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).

[edit] The process of empowerment

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

[edit] Workplace empowerment

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]

[edit] Economics and empowerment

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].

[edit] References
 • 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/m
cb/00483486/v27n1/s3/p40. Accessed February 16, 2004.

[edit] Notes
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

[edit] See also

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

[hide]
v•d•e
Youth empowerment

Evolving capacities · Intergenerational equity · Student voice · Youth-adult

Elements
partnership · Youth mainstreaming · Youth rights · Youth voice

Types Community youth development · Anarchistic free school · Positive youth

development · Student activism · Student-centered learning · Student
rights · Student voice · Youth activism · Youth council · Youth court ·
Youth engagement · Youth leadership · Youth-led media · Youth
movement · Youth participation · Youth philanthropy · Youth service ·
 Youth suffrage · Youth vote

Adultcentrism · Adultism · Ageism · Fear of youth (ephebiphobia) · Fear

Barriers
of children (pediaphobia)

See also: Index of youth rights-related articles

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empowerment"
Categories: Sociology | Management | Buzzwords
Hidden categories: Articles lacking sources from July 2007 | All articles lacking sources |
All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements from March
2008

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