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Showing papers on "Empowerment published in 1983"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors describe how power and powerlessness operate in human systems and propose strategies based on this knowledge to offer both client and worker an opportunity for constructive mana-...
Abstract: Knowing how power and powerlessness operate in human systems is a key to effective intervention. Strategies based on this knowledge offer both client and worker an opportunity for constructive mana...

180 citations


Book
01 Jan 1983
TL;DR: The history and legacy of the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study through a comprehensive collection of documents: articles, reports, letters, and newspaper accounts, as well as works of fiction, poetry, and drama.
Abstract: In this first general history of legal education, Stevens traces the development of law schools, the legal profession, and legal thought, relating their evolution to intellectual, political, and social trends. He describes how the establishment gained power over education after 1920 and how, in the past two decades, both students and the practicing profession have questioned this authority. He also examines the implications of the "legal revolution" and new opportunities for women and minorities. |This book uniquely reveals the history and legacy of the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study through a comprehensive collection of documents: articles, reports, letters, and newspaper accounts, as well as works of fiction, poetry, and drama.

136 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: It is argued that one of the key factors in healing illness is mobilizing resources of power, especially enhancing the ill person's sense of personal empowerment, because it both represents and objectifies power.
Abstract: This paper examines instances of ritual use of words in a diverse selection of alternative healing groups in a modern society. These words are distinguished by their users' belief that they are endowed with a power, an effectiveness, separate from and in addition to their literal meaning. Three specific features of ritual language contribute to its effectiveness: (1) its function as an objectification of power, (2) its transformative functions — especially its metaphoric and metonymic usages, and (3) its performative aspects. This paper argues that one of the key factors in healing illness is mobilizing resources of power, especially enhancing the ill person's sense of personal empowerment. Ritual language use in alternative healing is one of the foremost elements in this empowerment, because it both represents and objectifies power. Within a belief system in which they are significant, words of power indeed have the power to effect healing.

49 citations



Journal Article
TL;DR: It is suggested that the goals and strategies presented in such programs must be designed specifically for adolescents of different backgrounds if they are to result in empowerment of the participants.
Abstract: A small group workshop, developed for Big Sisters of Colorado, Inc. to complement their traditional program, was evaluated to determine its effectiveness for working-class and underclass adolescent girls. The "Life Choices" program was successful with working-class Ss, resulting in increased internality and perceived competence for school success, social relationships and general life events. These Ss also increased their knowledge of both traditional and non-traditional career alternatives. However, the program did not succeed with underclass adolescent girls, who showed no increase in internality or knowledge of career alternatives and reported a significant decrease in perceived competence after completing the same program. It is suggested that the goals and strategies presented in such programs must be designed specifically for adolescents of different backgrounds if they are to result in empowerment of the participants.

27 citations




Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present findings from a National Institute of Mental Health funded research and demonstration effort aimed at addressing impediments to seeking and receiving help in two white ethnic communities over a four year period.
Abstract: . This paper presents findings from a National Institute of Mental Health funded research and demonstration effort aimed at addressing impediments to seeking and receiving help in two white ethnic communities. A community mental health empowerment model was developed and implemented in the target communities over a four year period. This model succeeded in building upon the strengths of individuals and neighborhoods to help overcome help seeking and receiving obstacles. Mechanisms were developed through a variety of means to enhance the ability of lay and professional helpers to interact and work with each other.

17 citations


George L. Priest1
01 Jan 1983
TL;DR: For example, this article pointed out that the legal system can be best understood with the methods and theories of the social sciences and that the importance of law and of the study of law is radically transformed.
Abstract: I should like to address some implications of what I believe to be the most important development in legal scholarship of the past fifty years. Over this period, scholarship in the law, like scholarship in other intellectual fields, has undergone a tremendous specialization of interest. The direction this specialization has taken, however, is sharply different from the one that might have been expected fifty years ago. In 1930, prior to the realist revolution, future specialization in legal scholarship might have suggested increasingly detailed and narrow treatises addressing traditional legal subjects. Today, authorship of the legal treatise has been cast off to practitioners. The treatise is no longer even a credit to those competing on the leading edge of legal thought. Instead, legal scholarship has become specialized according to the separate social sciences. Specialization according to the social sciences has broken down older conceptions of distinctive legal categories. No modern scholar can usefully distinguish the various subjects of civil liability. The agency, corporations, and securities fields are only the most current subjects of this form of intellectual reorganization. The most significant implication of this development is the change in the position that law and the legal system occupy as subjects of research. It is accepted today, virtually universally, that the legal system can be best understood with the methods and theories of the social sciences. It follows from this view, however, that one must abandon the notion that law is a subject that can be usefully studied by persons trained only in the law. Furthermore, it follows necessarily that one must reject the notion that the legal system is somehow self-contained or self-sufficient instead of simply another setting for the expression of whatever are the deeper determinants of human behavior. As a consequence, the importance of law and of the study of law is radically transformed. The social sciences more particularly, the behavioral sciences challenge legal education substantively. They deny the importance of law as a subject.

15 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The financial insecurity of community clinics is an inherent feature of the private-public duality that affects the entire health-care system and community clinics and public hospitals offer a potential for broader organizing and empowerment.
Abstract: Social contradictions, including uneven economic development and the private-public duality, make community-based provision of health care difficult. The unrestricted expansion of private medical centers has been criticized from several perspectives including inadequate coordination of services, high costs, and negative effects on urban housing and living conditions. Corporate and professional control over health policy, monopolization, and public subsidization foster expansion of private institutions. While private facilities enlarge, public health-care institutions deteriorate, close, or shift to private management. Many clients eligible for care at public hospitals do not receive adequate attention in the private sector. Despite their achievements, community clinics have problems that threaten their survival. The financial insecurity of community clinics is an inherent feature of the private-public duality that affects the entire health-care system. Community clinics and public hospitals offer a potential for broader organizing and empowerment.

6 citations





01 Jan 1983
TL;DR: Structural features shared by all clinics give rise to common issues of interpersonal and organizational dynamics, and the experience and structure of legal education is, therefore, a clinical event which is an unexploited resource to professional training.
Abstract: The critical features of a clinic are an individual or group needing help to achieve a desired change, professional helpers with specialized knowledge and skill which may help effect that change, and an organizational context in which professional and client come together in a helping relationship.' By this definition, professional service organizations of all kinds provide services to their clients in clinics. Less obvious, professional schools by this definition are clinics as well. Students need help to change their status from laymen to individuals qualified to become licensed practitioners of law; faculty have special qualifications from training and experience to help the client-student achieve this goal; and courses and other organized activities in the school are the institutional contexts in which faculty and their student-clients meet to work together. Fieldwork courses in which we train students in applied settings are clinics with a dual focus, giving professional help both to student-practitioners and to their clients. Structural features shared by all clinics give rise to common issues of interpersonal and organizational dynamics, and the experience and structure of legal education is, therefore, a clinical event which is an unexploited resource to professional training. An experience with a case which would be used for a variety of lessons in a clinical course will help introduce the subject matter.


Journal Article
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on poor rural women and the ways in which poverty technology and the generation of income affect their lives, and stress the identification of needs the choice of solutions and the design development and manufacture of technologies aimed at raising levels of income.
Abstract: This paper focuses on poor rural women and the ways in which poverty technology and the generation of income affect their lives. The 1st part raises 3 policy issues centered around the need to: 1) maximize womens productivity and access to cash earnings in both traditional and new areas of economic enterprise through technically efficient and potentially profitable new devices and know-how; 2) enable women to gain access to information and to acquire and control technology; and 3) achieve a balance between the introduction of new technologies and displacement of female labor associated with mechanization and automation. The 2nd part of the paper deals with womens participation as users of technology and stresses the identification of needs the choice of solutions and the design development and manufacture of technologies aimed at raising levels of income. These opportunities are enhanced when women are organized into effective groups whose planning implementation and decision-making capacities contribute to their empowerment. Technologists have recently designed some low-cost devices to increase womens productivity in those areas which have been their traditional source of revenue. Improved tools are gradually becoming available to facilitate land preparation seeding weeding fertilizer application harvesting threshing and winnowing. However the thrust of efficient and profitable techniques for women should mainly be directed at assisting womens entry into innovative productive areas such as industry and fields where men traditionally dominate. These include commercial canning woodwork and charcoal production. In addition successful womens economic enterprises should be upgraded with efficient technological intervention. In order to enable women to gain access to information and to acquire and control technology they must be allowed access to skills training programs including management the repair and maintainance of equipment registered agricultrual marketing cooperatives or other types of special-interest organizations and the mainstream of technical information flows. In weighing the consequences of innovations certain trade-offs may have to be made in order to avoid massive unemployment and the further impoverishment of the poor. This means planning opportunities for alternative sources of income well in advance. This process gets under way as women initiate and go through the entire planning and management sequence.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A variety of forms of neighborhood empowerment have continued to evolve during the 1970s and 1980s as discussed by the authors, and these efforts have enhanced neighborhood participation, improved the delivery of neighborhood services, and helped resolve conflicts.
Abstract: A variety of forms of neighborhood empowerment have continued to evolve during the 1970s and 1980s. At the most basic level, neighborhood organizations have shown the capability to articulate successfully community interests to both the private and public sectors. Furthermore, these organizations have also shown the capacity to administer neighborhood services and have begun to take on more comprehensive policy making functions. Recent experiences indicate that these efforts have enhanced neighborhood participation, improved the delivery of neighborhood services, and helped resolve conflicts. While the current urban fiscal crisis provides some political opportunities for extending these neighborhood efforts, neighborhood groups will have to avoid vigilantly the economic and political entrapments present in the current situation.