The praxis of individual, organisational and social empowerment. (original) (raw)

Power, Empowerment and Social Participation- the Building of a Conceptual Model

European Journal of Social Science Education and Research

Social intervention integrates multidisciplinary and participative concepts and practices that, in different areas, contribute to social processes of empowerment, one of the intervention paradigms in contemporary society. The use of the term empowerment has been recurrent in the fields of psychological and social intervention and its definition implies the contribution of various knowledge. This requires the operational contextualization of its definition. Based on a review of the literature, this article intends to conceptualize and contextualize empowerment as a strategic process of intervention. It is structured around three topics that present the relations of power in contemporary society, as well as the conceptual process of empowerment and social participation. It produces a reflexive work combining various theoretical approaches of empowerment in order to define differente analitycal dimentions of the concept, and to produce a conceptual model that can be later operacionaliz...

Rethinking empowerment: Shared action against powerlessness

Psychology and society: Radical theory and …, 1996

Socially responsible psychologists are aware of the problem of power in the interconnected domains of psychological practice, knowledge, theory and ideology. Doing something worthwhile about the problem requires more than a description of the experience of powerlessness. We need to know something about how power relations are constructed and maintained (produced and reproduced) -knowing that we can identify points for intervention, and the characteristics of viable strategies. return to top

Empowerment: The intersection of identity and power in collective action

The intersection between power and identity

Collective action has been a particularly fruitful area in which to study the intersection of power and identity. In the last 20 years, research on this topic – particularly that examining crowd events – has yielded a number of important insights into the nature of identity, the empowerment process and the relation between the two. This chapter will focus on social psychological accounts of subjective power in collective action, which show how empowerment can operate as both ‘input’ and ‘output’ in such action. We begin by putting this theoretical work into historical context. The concept of empowerment originally belonged to activists, and inevitably involves identity, for it begs the question of ‘power for who’? Social psychology has largely researched subjective power in collective action through the concept of group efficacy, which in recent models is linked to the social identity perspective. The main part of the chapter focuses on the elaborated social identity model of crowd behaviour, from which we derive a series of novel implications and predictions for the causes of empowerment in collective action more generally. Specifically, we will show that in collective action the basis of empowerment is the sense of unity, which is explained by shared social identity; that unity is the basis of expectations of support for identity-congruent action that can serve to instantiate our identity in the world – something which we cannot achieve as individuals; this instantiation in itself can changes our belief and feels good. In the final section of the chapter, we draw out some possible psychosocial consequences of empowerment in collective action, before examining the material constraints and strategic possibilities for dealing with defeat.

The process of empowerment: Implications for theory and practice

Canadian Journal of Community Mental Health ( …, 1993

CANADIAN JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY MENTA! HEALTH p. 2). There Eire many sources of power. Personality, property/wealth, and in-fluential organizations have been identîfkd by Gai brait h (I9&3) as critical sources of power in the last part of this century. Others have ...

The phenomenology of empowerment in collective action

British Journal of …, 2005

Recent research has hypothesized that empowerment can arise from collective action through collective self-objectification (CSO), defined as action that actualizes participants’ social identity against the power of dominant groups. Activists (N = 37) described several experiences that made them feel empowered (and disempowered). Among the various explanations they offered for these feelings, the most prominent were CSO, unity, and support (or their absence). CSO was also predictive of reports of positive emotion, although unity was the best predictor of reports of further involvement. Overall, the study suggests that actualizing one’s social identity through collective action has personal as well as political significance.

Applying Empowerment Approach in Community Development

2018

This paper attempts to illustrate on how the empowerment theory can be applied as a critical approach to increase power and capacity of community development. Empowerment is not seen only in the theoretical and philosophical perspectives, but it is an alive approach and can be applied to increase the well-being of life to a better state at the individual, organisation and even community levels. Many community issues were discussed by academicians using the empowerment approach such as the issues of poverty, health, women, people with disabilities, single mothers, youths, leadership, organisations and so on. It is because this approach is an effective approach to resolve issues by empowering target individuals or groups to take effective actions through the capabilities and potentials developed. The discussion will begin with a review of the definitions of empowerment, which is closely related to the concept of power. In the context of community development, empowerment refers to the...