Empowerment
Empowerment as action refers both to the process of self-empowerment and to professional support of people, which enables them to overcome their sense of powerlessness and lack of influence, and to recognize and use their resources.
[4][5] Rappaport's (1984) definition includes: "Empowerment is viewed as a process: the mechanism by which people, organizations, and communities gain mastery over their lives.
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.
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).
The process of which enables individuals/groups to fully access personal or collective power, authority and influence, and to employ that strength when engaging with other people, institutions or society.
"[7] 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.
According to Albert Lenz, people behave primarily regressive in acute crisis situations and tend to leave the responsibility to professionals.
A recently coined term, self-empowerment "describes patients’ and informal caregivers’ power to perform activities that are not mandated by health care and to take control over their own lives and self-management with increased self-efficacy and confidence".
[15] 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.
[18] The strategy, produced by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Behavioural Insights Team at the UK Cabinet Office, sought to introduce voluntary measures and "nudges" which could help consumers "find and adopt the best choices for their circumstances and needs".
[19] Activities promoted by the strategy included the midata programme under the direction of Professor Nigel Shadbolt, annual credit card usage statements, collective purchasing schemes, and presentational work on Energy Performance Certificates, motor vehicle sales literature and food hygiene ratings, so that consumers can make better use of the information they contain.
[27] 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.
[31] According to Thomas A. Potterfield,[32] many organizational theorists and practitioners regard employee empowerment Archived 2021-06-20 at the Wayback Machine as one of the most important and popular management concepts of our time.
[33] In the sphere of management and organizational theory, "empowerment" often refers loosely to processes for giving subordinates (or workers generally) greater discretion and resources: distributing control in order to better serve both customers and the interests of employing organizations.
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 context, empowerment involves approaches that promise greater participation and integration to the employee in order to cope with their tasks as independently as possible and responsibly can.
Multidisciplinary empowerment teams aim for the development of quality circles to improve the organizational culture, strengthening the motivation and the skills of employees.
The target of subjective job satisfaction of employees is pursued through flat hierarchies, participation in decisions, opening of creative effort, a positive, appreciative team culture, self-evaluation, taking responsibility (for results), more self-determination and constant further learning.
In the book Empowerment Takes More Than a Minute, the authors illustrate three keys that organizations can use to open the knowledge, experience, and motivation power that people already have.
Empowerment is an approach to modelling intrinsic motivation where advantageous actions are chosen by agent with just knowledge of the structure of the environment, rather than satisfying an externally imposed need as in homeostasis.
[38] Marshall McLuhan insisted that the development of electronic media would eventually weaken the hierarchical structures that underpin central governments, large corporation, academia and, more generally, rigid, “linear-Cartesian” forms of social organization.
Citizens would be bound to ask for substantially more say in the management of government affairs, production, consumption, and education [39] World Pensions Council (WPC) economist Nicolas Firzli has argued that rapidly rising cultural tides, notably new forms of online engagement and increased demands for ESG-driven public policies and managerial decisions are transforming the way governments and corporation interact with citizen-consumers in the “Age of Empowerment” [26]
