Notes on Empowerment Theory & Models of Empowerment (Individual & Collective) Part I

8/3/2019 Notes on Empowerment Theory & Models of Empowerment (Individual & Collective) Part I

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Empowerment Stanton-Salazar1

Ricardo D. Stanton-Salazar, Ph.D. Professor of Education and Sociology

Released October 28, 2011

Notes on Research Literature on Empowerment Theory, & Models of Empowerment (Individual & Collective)




The group is a mediating agency among the various levels of empowerment:(1) it connects between the individual and the community empowerment processes,(2) it connects among the individuals who participate in it and between them and the

environment that is relevant to their lives.

[RSS: “social closure” and “group cohesion” as the process by which the individuals in thenetwork empower themselves; they organize for the purposes of power—this can be an upper middle-class community, or it can be a group or community that has not had many opportunitiesto “participate in power.” Thus, those trained in Saul Alinsky’s organizing strategies, find waysto create “social closure” among community members for purposes of acting as a “political

body” that will exert power upon an institution (e.g., the City Council and the Mayor). ]

[RSS: Thus, the “institutional agent,” committed to the community’s ‘empowerment’ must knowhow to bring about “social closure”—and this may be difficult if members of that communityhave not formed coalitions before—e.g., African American parents and Mexican immigrant

parents]

[Three Basic Types of Community Organizing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_organizing ]

There are three basic types of community organizing, grassroots organizing, faith based communityorganizing (also called institution based community organizing, broad-based community organizingor congregation based community organizing), and coalition building. Additionally, politicalcampaigns often claim that their door-to-door operations are in fact an effort to organize thecommunity, but most often these operations are focused exclusively on voter identification and turnout.

The ideal of grassroots organizing is to build community groups from scratch, develop newleadership where none existed, and otherwise organize the unorganized. Faith-based communityorganizing, FBCO, is a deliberate methodology of developing the power and relationshipsthroughout a community of institutions such as congregations, unions, and associations. Built on thework of Saul Alinsky in the mid-1900s, there are now 180 FBCOs in the US as well as in SouthAfrica, England, Germany, and other nations (according to Interfaith Funders' 2001 study Faith

Based Community Organizing: State of the Field, by Mark Warren and Richard Wood).]

[back to Elisheva Sadan's book]

[the importance of the group]The attempts to conceptualize individual empowerment by means of various psychologicalcriteria (see Chapter 2) have led me to the conclusion that the activity in a group, no less thanthe personality, determines whether the empowerment process will or will not take place in the

person’s life.

A person whose circumstances and conditions have led her to participate in an empowerment-encouraging group has a better chance of becoming empowered than someone who has not

participated in such a group also testified about how much the activity in the group hadinfluenced him:

“I would not have been the person I am today if I hadn’t gone through what I went through inthe group.”




[UNPACKING DISEMPOWERMENT— Elisheva Sadan— p. 196]:

I claim that processes of empowerment and disempowerment influence the way that peopleunderstand their environment and their degree of commitment to take responsibility for this

environment.

Disempowerment processes: [i.e., alienation]• make people feel small,• and imbue them with a sense of marginality and worthlessness to the point of alienation

and indifference.

People therefore feel that there is no connection between themselves and society, and theycertainly have neither the will nor the ability to work for its well-being.

****

[RSS: Looking at other literature on “alienation.”]Why Is the Concept of Alienation Important? By Richard Schmitt

[p. 15]: LIBERALISM PRODUCES AND MAINTAINS ALIENATION

[liberalism conceals alienation]: For women and other groups, never admitted to the privileges of autonomy, it lays the blame for their obvious lack of autonomy on them…

[only (3) kinds of discontent according to liberal vocabulary]:1) deprivation of rights2) extreme material deprivation3) personal inadequacy

[liberal ideology—blaming the victim ]: The liberal holding on to the belief that one can insulateoneself against unwanted external influences, that the beliefs and values of others need not affectmine, has no choice but to interpret these cases as the results of personal failures, specificallyfailures of emancipate oneself from one’s surroundings, failure to become “the captain of one’sship, and the master of one’s soul.” [p. 15]

*****

Empowerment processes create the opposite affect— [p. 196] [1] people feel that they can influence,[2] they are willing to commit themselves and to take responsibility, andto play an active role in the world,

….because they know that their efforts are important and valuable.

The question that arises here is: What are the boundaries of a person’s relevant environment?




For what environment will a person be willing to take responsibility? The assumption that hasguided me so far has been that the relevant environment of people at the beginning of their empowerment process is relatively narrow. The word community, and community planning,designate this narrow realm to the local and the familiar. [same as Saul Alinksky]

But for the purpose of the present claim I want to burst through this assumption and to say thatwe, professionals, do not know enough about people’s potential for concern, commitment, andresponsibility, because we are more concerned with the limits of our own intervention than withthe extent of the environment that is important to them.

We consider the boundaries objective, while we gather data and information about peoplethat of course also includes their subjective data.

Disempowering planning does not consider subjective boundaries at all, precisely because theyare subjective (Stokols, 1987). Empowering planning avoids the use of the terms objective and

subjective as distinguishing between true and false.

[The dominant group imposes it’s subjectivity on subordinate people as “objective reality,”…this is precisely what Bourdieu termed, “symbolic violence.” The dominant group imposesit’s subjective agend as “right,”as “civilization,” and as “progress”: e.g., the US-Mexican War;the slave trade, the annexation of the Southwest, the incorporation of Hawaii, the destruction of unions.]

My claim is that for the sake of survival in the world, and not only for the sake of the quality of our lives as a society and a community , we must aspire to the empowerment of as manypeople and communities as possible, because the more empowered people are, the morecapable they are of caring for a broader environment.

[RSS: Research questions for your dissertation—Find a way to investigate the ideological agenda of the intervention you are studying (i.e., the “subjectivities” of the ‘institutional agents’you are studying.)

[Taken from: LEE S. SHULMAN, one of my professors at Stanford;http://www.ntlf.com/html/lib/carnegie/84shul.htm ]

“As an ideology, professionalism had both a technical and a moral aspect. Technically, it promisedcompetent performance of skilled work involving the application of broad and complex knowledge, theacquisition of which required formal academic study. Morally [ideologically], it promised to be guided

by an appreciation of the important social ends it served. In demanding high levels of self-governance, professionals claimed not only that others were not technically equipped to judge them, but that they alsocould not be trusted to judge them. The idea was expressed in classic form by R. H. Tawney:"[Professionals] may, as in the case of the successful doctor, grow rich; but the meaning of their

profession, both for themselves and for the public, is not that they make money, but that they make healthor safety or knowledge or good government or good law.... [Professions uphold] as the criterion of success the end for which the profession, whatever it may be, is carried on, and [subordinate] theinclination, appetites, and ambition of individuals to the rules of an organization which has as itsobject to promote performance of function." These functions for Tawney and for many other advocates of the professions, were activities that embodied and expressed the idea of larger social

purposes.”]




Bateson (1979) claims that mind and nature, which are our thinking about the environment andthe real environment in which we think, are interwoven.

….. we act in relation to the environment by means of the definition that we have given

this environment. That is to say, there is a close connection between:

(1) how a person thinks about the environment and(2) her ability to act within this environment.

“By survival, I mean [...] in negative terms, [...] the avoidance of the death of the largest systemabout which we can care [...] We cannot care much about the inevitable survival of systemslarger than our own ecology” (Bateson, 1979, pp. 243-244).

Individual Empowerment Broadens Awareness of the Environment [p. 198]

It may be assumed that empowerment of the individual broadens the environment she is awareof. Development of a critical self-consciousness broadens the individual’s sense of responsibility for the environment’s survival. The added knowledge, information and ability thatthe empowerment process provides also lead to responsibility for the survival of a much

broader environment than before the empowerment process.

“I feel that I walk more erect now and so the distance I can see to has grown and broadened (an activist on the founding of a service for children with developmental disabilities). “

“At first I knew only my street, I hardly knew what there was in the city. Today I know theentire city, including the industrial zone” (an activist on the founding of a service for children with developmental disabilities). [RSS: I address this in terms of “network orientation.”]

[RSS: How does this translate into how community-based interventions enable kids in the program to how the walls of racial segregation are self-regulated—imposed on oneself.]

The empowerment process gives the local environmental knowledge a new context—anintellectual understanding of the social situation, which encourages a sense of greater control of the environment and an ability to feel at home in the world (Howard, 1993).

[Link to the literature on “service-learning]: http://www.pitt.edu/~mporter/Slinfo.html

“The terms service-learning and community service are sometimes used interchangeable, theyare not synonymous. Community service can be, and often is, a powerful experience for young

people, but community service ripens to service-learning when there is a deliberate and explicitconnection made between service and learning opportunities which are then accompanied byconscious and thoughtful occasions to prepare for and reflect on the service experience."

[RSS: “Empowerment theory” has, of course, a particular ideological take on “service learning.”]

[for further readings: Dewey, John. (1916.). Democracy and Education. New York: The Free Press.]




[to feel at home in multiple worlds : …taken from Stanton-Salazar, 1997:

“In light of the social structural forces which constrain network development and which threaten

social development, effective coping [ authentic empowerment through intervention ] amongworking-class, minority youth usually entails…• a network orientation of almost hyper-rationality and of extraordinary psychic fortitude;• it also entails a behavioral repertoire necessary to maximize the supportive potential of

protective agents and to simultaneously participate in the dominant 'culture of power.'

• For this group, a bicultural network orientation not only implies general facility withsimultaneous participation in multiple social worlds which embody competing norms,expectations, and socialization agendas (Simmel, 1955; Merton, 1949; Coser, 1975;Boykin, 1985, 1986),…

• it also implies a certain meta-awareness of relational strategies for negotiating one's waywithin social and institutional settings tacitly organized on the basis of systems of

exclusion and latent cultural conflict.

• It implies a constellation of super-psychic abilities, which include a tolerance for contradiction and ambiguity,

• an ability to juggle complex and disparate social identities,• an ability to code-switch linguistically in different cultural settings,• to act instrumentally in one setting, expressively in another, and both instrumentally and

expressively in still another, in total, an ability to operate in a culturally pluralistic modewhile maintaining high self-regard (see Anzaldua, 1987).”

RSS: How do you translate this into behavioral and cognitive objectives, into a curriculum, and programmatic activities that would develop and exercise these competencies? How to build anintervention based on “empowerment theory” and theories of social capital?]

[back to Elisheva Sadan ]

The importance of the process is that it awakens a sense of responsibility towards what isincluded in the home. People have testified that they are aware of a more comprehensive andcomplex environment, and at the same time have a better understanding of their place in it andof its importance in their lives. They are therefore also willing to care for its survival.

[RSS: This “caring” of the environment—for one’s school, for one’s “hood” are also issueshaving to do with “social integration” [i.e., “the normative model”] —but certainly not in theway that Coleman and other liberal scholars have talked about “social integration” [socialclosure] and “social capital.” ] [We need the “normative model” to talk about social movementsand community-based organizing, and the kind of parent organizing that Pedro Noguera talksabout.]




[ Psychological Empowerment with sociological foundations ]

Activists in neighborhoods I have worked in, and one of the boys in the struggle over the schoolas well, have told me that they feel wiser. Wisdom is the integration of environmental

knowledge with a social understanding and an inner sense of ability. Heskin (1991) speaks aboutorganic intellectuals, local leaders who have the ability to narrate and to theorize theempowerment experience for others. These people are important for the communityempowerment processes because they give the community a reflection of the process it hasgone through. Heskin believes that the presence of organic intellectuals in a community is acoincidence. I [ Elisheva Sadan ] see the process of environmental broadening and individualempowerment as the source from which the organic intellectual grows.

[RSS: “institutional agents” as “organic intellectuals” – goals of the intervention: to transformurban kids into “organic intellectuals”]

One could also formulate an assumption which says that awareness of a broader environmentadvances individual empowerment processes. That is to say, the environment is a means of encouraging empowerment. The creation of a spiral of mutual influence between individualempowerment and the environment is a professional task—it is possible to develop a learningstyle and a way of getting to know the environment that will enhance people’s sense of controland their real ability to influence the environment. The knowledge itself empowers, but what isfundamentally empowering is the ability to absorb knowledge in an active and critical manner.Getting to know an environment which on the face of it is already familiar to us often means adeepening, and not only a broadening, of the knowledge of the environment. The mostempowering materials are those that are taken from the immediate environment for the purposeof critical and analytical observation.

People who have learned for the first time how to make a geographical map of their area have been astounded by the new knowledge that they have acquired about the place where they havelived all their lives. This is an active understanding of the individual’s world, which signifies the

beginnings of the empowerment process (Freire, 1970; Marcus, 1995).

The boys and girls who participated in the struggle for the survival of their high school got toknow the political environment relevant to their struggle – the local authorities, the nationalinstitutions, and the legislative authority – in the very course of their struggle. They met with

people on all administrative and political levels and learned to understand the roles of officialsin the education system, members of the Israeli parliament’s Education Committee and theteachers’ trade union. No Civics class could have let them absorb this knowledge and arrive atan active and critical acquaintance with it as much as the action they initiated and conducted did.

The parents who founded a service for their disabled children testified that in order for them to be able to survive they need to continue to develop connections with institutions andorganizations in their city and in the relevant national institutions. The process of activelygetting to know the environment nourished their empowerment, as well as the frustrationsand the difficulties they grapple with.




[KEY POINT]: It is the organization that they set up, and not their children’s problem, thathas made them experts on the subject of their children’s special problems. They testify that

before the organization was set up they only knew about the problems through the individualchild. Today they know much more about it through the shared knowledge that has

accumulated in their community organization.

[RSS: key function of many effective intervention programs: “ shared knowledge that hasaccumulated in their community organization.” QUESTION:[RSS: key function of many effective intervention programs: “ shared knowledge that hasaccumulated in their community organization.” QUESTION: How would you find outabout this in your interviews with program leaders? Methodology]

[p. 201]

Every social entity (an individual, a community, or an organization) organizes its socialenvironment in the same way that it organizes its internal actions (Morgan, 1986). This is yetanother interpretation of the connection between the inner process and the environment, thistime implying the real ability to care for the environment’s survival by means of organizing.

The ability to shape the environment according to the inner interpretation is evidence of considerable power, because other factors wanting to do the same are also active in theenvironment. Although it is customary to assume that a social environment is created through amutual interpretation by the bodies participating in it, …

I [ Elisheva Sadan ] claim that mutual interpretation is indeed such only when all the participants have an equal ability to contribute to it. When we acknowledge that there areindividuals and groups in the society whose powerlessness prevents their participation in themutual interpretation which creates their society, we must also acknowledge our socialobligation to enable them to become more involved in the environment so that it will alsoinclude their interpretation, that is to say, that it will suit them as well.

Further Signs of Individual Empowerment [p. 202]

Signs of individual empowerment are proofs of the realization of the empowerment process inthe context of community planning. These signs are based on

• overt criteria,• testimonies about which may be obtained from people who have been participants

in processes of individual empowerment.

Individual empowerment processes that occur in the context of community planning are part of a shared experience, and it is important that they meet the shared evaluation of all the

participants in the process.

I wish to discuss a number of further signs of individual empowerment that have been revealedat community planning processes. There is nothing final or exhaustive in this list: the individualempowerment process certainly becomes realized in many other ways. However, for planners to

be able to understand their significance, and to encourage their occurrence, it is important toanalyze several distinctive signs of the process. Apart from feelings of anger and dissonance,




which are a distinctive sign of the beginnings of the path, and the critical consciousness which isone of the peaks of the individual empowerment process, we must not seek a fixed pattern ora developmental sequence which can order the signs. It is important only to acknowledge thatin the individual empowerment process several sub-processes occur, some of them more

personal and some more social. Some are common to all the participants, and others are

idiosyncratic.

Feelings of Anger and Dissonance [p. 203] [e.g., over attempts to pass authoritarian legislationagainst undocumented workers]

Testimonies about dissonance between a person’s inner feelings and the accepted socialinterpretation of his situation [by the dominant group] are commonplace among people whohave experienced empowerment. The feelings of dissonance are a kind of emotional preludethat heralds the beginning of the process. [RSS: Jean Anyon and many others have talk about how Rap music can

be a catalyst for critical consciousness and community empowerment]

They include:• constructive internal dialogue that people report having conducted with themselves for

years (Kieffer, 1983);• a vague sense of dissonance which some writers call navigating a line of fault

(Lengerman & Niebrugge-Brentley, 1988), and others call lack of fit (Germain, 1979) or the problem that does not have a name (Friedan, 1963).

• In some of the people these feelings crystallize into a more defined consciousness.

Mutual Help and a Sense of Self-Worth [p. 204]

Filling a Socially Valuable Role, and Leadership [p. 205]

Active participation in a group creates an opportunity to take part in an equitable process inwhich people experience different social relations and ways of decision making to those theywere accustomed to until then.

Learning and Practicing Social Skills [p. 208]

Women who fill roles of network centers and men who fill roles of spokesmen use differentsocial skills.

Development of a Critical Consciousness [p. 209]

A critical consciousness is the ability to think and to criticize that comes together with the permission to express yourself. The transition from having no voice to speaking in front of anaudience is both a physical and a mental change. Whereas isolation is paralysis and silence,social belonging connects with upright bearing and action.

Praxis [p. 211]

Praxis is a way of learning that integrates activity and thinking about activity. In this method,the critical conscious is integrated into the social activity, and is not separated from it. “Fromthe perspective of planning, the separation from political practice is not permissible. [...]




Critique unrelated to action is a respectable, bourgeois practice that is tolerated precisely because it is irrlevant (Friedmann, 1987, p. 268).

Restoration of Respect [p. 213]

Individual empowerment is a process of restoring people’s lost dignity. Two concepts of equality are accepted in a democracy: equality of respect and equality of rights. Some writersclaim that the struggle for equal rights became more bitter when people despaired of achievingthe right for respect (Heskin, 1991).

Commitment to Devote Time to the Process and Access to Resources of Time [p. 214]

The individual empowerment process demands a great investment of time from the individual.Generally it is customary to calculate time in a planning project only as the costs to theinvestors and the professionals, and to ignore the investment of time by other participants in the

process (Churchman, 1990a). We will discuss this aspect here. [go to]




Dewey & Freire

Mark Hedley: http://www.siue.edu/SOCIOLOGY/journal/v32hedley.htm

According to Dewey, the central function of a democratic society is to embrace social change as

motivated by the interests of a populace to improve its condition. Not surprisingly, Dewey viewseducation as informing a populace of what its condition is and how it may be improved. [RSS: by establishing military bases all over the globe and installing ‘puppet governments’]Therefore, education in a democratic society serves a unique role:

Particularly it is true that a society which not only changes but whichhas the ideal of such change as will improve it, will have different standards and methods of education from one which aims simply at the perpetuation of its own customs. (1944; p. 81)

Friere’s perspective is grounded upon a concerted focus on education’s ability to develop in alllearners a critical consciousness, one that …

A...would enable ( wo)men to discuss courageously the problems of their context B and tointervene in that context (1973, p. 33). This critical consciousness does not exist as theintellectual property of the privileged [of the “institutional agent”]. Rather, it is organicallygenerated among the masses by the experience of self-empowerment. [and can befacilitated by institutional agents; go to “empowerment theory”]




LYND A J. BERGSMA

Empowerment is often defined by its absence, leading to victim blaming, learned helplessness,

powerlessness, and alienation. This article defines empowerment as a process by which peoplegain control over their lives, democratic participation in the life of their community (Rappaport,1987), and acritical understanding of their environment (Zimmerman, Israel, Schulz,&Checkoway, 1992). To study the consequences of the empowering process, it is helpful tooperationalize empowerment in terms of outcomes. Empowered outcomes for individuals mightinclude perceived control and resource mobilization skills (Perkins & Zimmerman, 1995). In thearea of health, we think in terms of wellness versus illness, competence versus deficits, and

power to take action versus powerlessness. Empowerment research focuses on identifyingassets and capabilities, instead of cataloging risk factors, and on exploring environmentalinfluences of social problems instead of blaming victims.

Empowerment -oriented interventions focus on enhancing wellness as well as solving problems,providing opportunities for participants to develop knowledge and skills, and engagingprofessionals as collaborators instead of authoritative experts.

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:zvyzewSATF8J:www.coe.int/T/E/Human_Rights/media/ForumStrbgBergsmaInfoDoc04_en.pdf+%2B%22empowerment+theory%22+%2B%22empowerment%22+%2Bdefined&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=2

WORLD BANK

Empowerment outcomes. Much of empowerment literature focuses on participatoryempowering strategies that lead to outcomes as ends in themselves, yet they are also

intermediate steps to health and development outcomes. Most of the literature on empowermentoutcomes centres on psychological empowerment (67), measured by collective efficacy (thebelief that people together can make a difference) (68), outcome efficacy (the belief that one’sactions can produce results) (69), political efficacy (the belief that one can influence the politicalprocess, organizations and communities) (70–72), critical thinking ability (73) and participatorybehaviour. Much research has accrued on the interconnectedness of psychologicalempowerment, level of participation and a sense of community (i.e., people’s identification andbonding with their social networks or place of residence). Community participation is facilitatedby an existing sense of community and psychological empowerment; psychologicalempowerment and sense of community, in turn, are promoted by participation. The sense of community is a particularly robust predictor of involvement in neighbourhood and communityaction (74-76). Other socio-psychological variables also facilitate increased participation. In ayouth healthy heart advocacy initiative, participation was significantly associated with youth’s

sense of community, perceived value of health, psychological empowerment and perceivedpolicy control (77). Psychological empowerment was significantly associated with increasedparticipation, sense of community and positive organizational climate in youth tobacco controlinterventions and community coalitions (78,79).

Notes on Empowerment Theory & Models of Empowerment (Individual & Collective) Part I

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