To do work with power. The term empowerment originates from American community psychology and is associated [ by whom?

Empowerment - Wikipedia

These sociological ideas have continued to be developed and refined through Neo-Marxist Theory also known as Critical Theory. In social work , empowerment forms a practical approach of resource-oriented intervention. In the field of citizenship education and democratic education , empowerment is seen [ by whom? Empowerment is a key concept in the discourse on promoting civic engagement. Empowerment as a concept, which is characterized by a move away from a deficit -oriented towards a more strength-oriented perception, can increasingly be found in management concepts, as well as in the areas of continuing education and self-help.

Robert Adams points to the limitations of any single definition of 'empowerment', and the danger that academic or specialist definitions might take away the word and the connected practices from the very people they are supposed to belong to. One definition for the term is "an intentional, ongoing process centered in the local community, involving mutual respect, critical reflection, caring, and group participation, through which people lacking an equal share of resources gain greater access to and control over those resources".

Rappaport's definition includes: 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 also associated with feminism.

Empowerment is the process of obtaining 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. 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 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 ensure 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. 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. To empower a female " Before there can be the finding that a particular group requires empowerment and that therefore their self-esteem needs to be consolidated on the basis of awareness of their strengths, there needs to be a deficit diagnosis usually carried out by experts assessing the problems of this group. The fundamental asymmetry of the relationship between experts and clients is usually not questioned by empowerment processes.

It is particularly questionable whether mentally ill people in acute crisis situations are in a position to make their own decisions. According to Albert Lenz, people behave primarily regressive in acute crisis situations and tend to leave the responsibility to professionals.

In social work , empowerment offers an approach that allows social workers to increase the capacity for self-help of their clients. Marginalized people who lack 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.


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This in turn can lead to psychological, social and even mental health problems. As a concept, and model of practice, empowerment is also used in health promotion research and practice. The key principle is for individuals to gain increased control over factors that influence their health status [12].

To empower individuals and to obtain more equity in health, it is also important to address health-related behaviors [13]. Studies suggest that health promotion interventions aiming at empowering adolescents should enable active learning activities, use visualizing tools to facilitate self-reflection, and allow the adolescents to influence intervention activities [14]. According to Robert Adams, there is a long tradition in the UK and the USA respectively to advance forms of self-help that have developed and contributed to more recent concepts of empowerment.

For example, the free enterprise economic theories of Milton Friedman embraced self-help as a respectable contributor to the economy. 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. The World Pensions Council WPC has argued that large institutional investors such as pension funds and endowments are exercising a greater influence on the process of adding and replacing corporate directors — as they are themselves steered to do so by their own board members pension trustees.

Legal empowerment happens when marginalised people or groups use the legal mobilisation i. Legal empowerment approaches are interested in understanding how they can use the law to advance interests and priorities of the marginalised. According to 'Open society foundations' an NGO "Legal empowerment is about strengthening the capacity of all people to exercise their rights , either as individuals or as members of a community.

Legal empowerment is about grass root justice, about ensuring that law is not confined to books or courtrooms, but rather is available and meaningful to ordinary people. Lorenzo Cotula in his book ' Legal Empowerment for Local Resource Control ' outlines the fact that legal tools for securing local resource rights are enshrined in legal system, does not necessarily mean that local resource users are in position to use them and benefit from them.

The state legal system is constrained by a range of different factors — from lack of resources to cultural issues. Among these factors economic, geographic, linguistic and other constraints on access to courts, lack of legal awareness as well as legal assistance tend to be recurrent problems. In many context, marginalised groups do not trust the legal system owing to the widespread manipulation that it has historically been subjected to by the more powerful.

Sometimes groups are marginalized by society at large, with governments participating in the process of marginalization. Equal opportunity laws which actively oppose such marginalization, are supposed to allow empowerment to occur. These laws made it illegal to restrict access to schools and public places based on race. They can also be seen as a symptom of minorities' and women's empowerment through lobbying. Gender empowerment conventionally refers to the empowerment of women , which is a significant topic of discussion in regards to development and economics nowadays.

It also points to approaches regarding other marginalized genders in a particular political or social context. This approach to empowerment is partly informed by feminism and employed legal empowerment by building on international human rights. Empowerment is one of the main procedural concerns when addressing human rights and development. According to Thomas A. Potterfield, [23] many organizational theorists and practitioners regard employee empowerment as one of the most important and popular management concepts of our time. Ciulla discusses an inverse case: Test Your Knowledge - and learn some interesting things along the way.

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Empowerment

A word with surprisingly literal origins. Do you feel lucky? How we chose 'justice'. And is one way more correct than the others? How to use a word that literally drives some people nuts. The awkward case of 'his or her'. Identify the word pairs with a common ancestor. Can you spell these 10 commonly misspelled words? Examples of empower in a Sentence seeking changes in the workplace that will empower women the federal agency empowered to collect taxes.

Recent Examples on the Web During their meeting, the pair were said to have talked about ways to continue empowering girls and women around the world. Mcgavin, Daily Southtown , "Guide to outdoor dining in Chicago suburbs: Public Landing in Lockport," 8 July This is the only way to empower users to decide what collection is legitimate and what isn't.

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Empowering Women and Cooking," 17 Sep. First Known Use of empower , in the meaning defined at sense 1. Learn More about empower. Resources for empower Time Traveler! Explore the year a word first appeared. Dictionary Entries near empower Emporia emporium empory empower empowerment empresario empress. Time Traveler for empower The first known use of empower was in See more words from the same year.


  • empower | Definition of empower in English by Oxford Dictionaries.
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English Language Learners Definition of empower.