Showing papers on "Empowerment published in 1994"

Who Takes the Credit?: Gender, Power, and Control Over Loan Use in Rural Credit Programmes in Bangladesh

Abstract: Special credit institutions in Bangladesh have dramatically increased the credit available to poor rural women since the mid-1980s. Though this is intended to contribute to women's empowerment, few evaluations of loan use investigate whether women actually control this credit. Most often, women's continued high demand for loans and their manifestly high propensity to repay is taken as a proxy indicator for control and empowerment. This paper challenges this assumption by exploring variations in the degree to which women borrowers control their loans directly; reporting on recent research which finds a significant proportion of women's loans to be controlled by male relatives. The paper finds that a preoccupation with “credit performance” — measured primarily in terms of high repayment rates — affects the incentives of fieldworkers dispensing and recovering credit, in ways which may outweigh concerns to ensure that women develop meaningful control over their investment activities.

A field of one's own

Abstract: This is the first major study of gender and property in South Asia. In a pioneering and comprehensive analysis Bina Agarwal argues that the single most important economic factor affecting women's situation is the gender gap in command over property. In rural South Asia, the most significant form of property is arable land, a critical determinant of economic well-being, social status, and empowerment. But few women own land; fewer control it. Drawing on a vast range of interdisciplinary sources and her own field research, and tracing regional variations across five countries, the author investigates the complex barriers to women's land ownership and control, and how they might be overcome. The book makes significant and original contributions to theory and policy concerning land reforms, 'bargaining' and gender relations, women's status, and the nature of resistance.

Empowerment through Photo Novella: Portraits of Participation

Abstract: Photo novella does not entrust cameras to health specialists, policymakers, or profes sional photographers, but puts them in the hands of children, rural women, grassroots workers, and other constituents with little access to those who make decisions over their lives. Promoting what Brazilian educator Paulo Freire has termed "education for critical consciousness," photo novella allows people to document and discuss their life conditions as they see them. This process of empowerment education also enables community members with little money, power, or status to communicate to policymakers where change must occur. This paper describes photo novella's underpinnings: empowerment education, feminist theory, and documentary photography. It draws on our experience implementing the process among 62 rural Chinese women, and shows that two major implications of photo novella are its contributions to changes in consciousness and in forming policy. The camera is my tool. Through it I give a reason to everything aroun...

Health Education and Community Empowerment: Conceptualizing and Measuring Perceptions of Individual, Organizational, and Community Control

Abstract: The prevailing emphasis in health education is on understanding and changing life-style choices and individual health behaviors related to health status. Although such approaches are appropriate for some health problems, they often ignore the association between increased morbidity and mortality and social, structural, and physical factors in the environment, such as inadequate housing, poor sanitation, unemployment, exposure to toxic chemicals, occupational stress, minority status, powerlessness or alienation, and the lack of supportive interpersonal relationships. A conceptual model of the stress process incorporates the relationships among these environmental factors, powerlessness (or conversely empowerment), social support, and health status. The concept of empowerment has been examined in diverse academic disciplines and professional fields. However, there is still a lack of clarity on the conceptualization of empowerment at different levels of practice, including its measurement, relationship to health, and application to health education. The purpose of this article is to address these issues as they relate to the concept of community empowerment. It provides a definition of community empowerment that includes individual, organizational, and community levels of analysis; describes how empowerment fits within a broader conceptual model of stress and its relationship to health status; and examines a series of scales that measure perceptions of individual, organizational, community, and multiple levels of control. The article concludes with broad guidelines for and barriers to a community empowerment approach for health education practice.

In Search of Management: Culture, Chaos and Control in Managerial Work

Abstract: This book aims to cover the sorts of issues that managers constantly face: competencies; empowerment; chaos; culture change; survival; and competition. How do they understand these terms and apply them in their everyday lives? Tony Watson looks at the nature of managerial skill and organizational effectiveness, asking managers what it is they think they do, what power do they really have, how they manage under increasing pressure and whether they feel in control. By searching for a definition of management from managers themselves, Tony Watson draws a picture of the way managers shape their own lives and identities at the same time as shaping the organization's work activities. This book should be of interest to all those studying management, particularly MBA and other post-experience qualifications, as well as the general manager. The author has also published "Sociology, Work and Industry" (Routledge 1987), "Management, Organization and Employment Strategy" (Routledge, 1986), "Sociology, Work and Industry" (Routledge, 1980), and "The Personnel Managers" (Routledge, 1977).

Credit programs, women's empowerment, and contraceptive use in rural Bangladesh.

Abstract: This article presents findings of research addressing the question of how women's status affects fertility. The effects on contraceptive use of women's participation in rural credit programs and on their status or level of empowerment were examined. A woman's level of empowerment is defined here as a function of her relative physical mobility, economic security, ability to make various purchases on her own, freedom from domination and violence within her family, political and legal awareness, and participation in public protests and political campaigning. The main finding is that participation in both of the credit programs studied, those of Grameen Bank and Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), is positively associated with women's level of empowerment. A positive effect on contraceptive use is discernible among both participants and nonparticipants in Grameen Bank villages. Participation in BRAC does not appear to affect contraceptive use.

Understanding and Promoting Transformative Learning: A Guide for Educators of Adults. Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series.

Abstract: Preface to the Second Edition. About the Author. 1. Dimensions of Adult Learning. 2. Transformative Learning Theory. 3. A Theory in Progress. 4. Transformation: The Learner's Story. 5. Individual Differences. 6. Educator Roles. 7. Empowering Learners. 8. Fostering Critical Self-Reflection and Self-Knowledge. 9. Supporting Transformative Learning. 10. The Educator's Transformative Journey. References. Index.

Empowerment: the holy grail of health promotion?

Abstract: Potentially, empowerment has much to offer health promotion. However, some caution needs to be exercised before the notion is wholeheartedly embraced as the major goal of health promotion. The lack of a clear theoretical underpinning, distortion of the concept by different users, measurement ambiguities, and structural barriers make 'empowerment' difficult to attain. To further discussion, th is paper proposes several assertions about the definition, components, process and outcome of 'empowerment', including the need for a distinction between psychological and community empowerment. These assertions and a model of community empowerment are offered in an attempt to clarify an important issue for health promotion.

The empowerment approach to social work practice

Abstract: Demonstrates how social workers can use an empowerment approach when dealing with those who have experienced oppression by virtue of poverty, colour, gender, sex or race. The reader is shown how the oppressed can learn to attain goals both individually and within the wider social environment.

Shatter the glass ceiling: Women may make better managers

Abstract: There is considerable evidence that women encounter a glass ceiling or barrier to advancement into the executive ranks of organizations. Although many expected this barrier to be obliterated with the large influx of women entering the work force over the last two decades, little change has actually occurred in the most senior ranks. In most sectors, women still comprise less than 5 percent of board directorships and corporate officerships. This article focuses on emerging evidence which indicates that the trend in U.S. corporations toward high-involvement work teams, consensus decision making, and empowerment may actually benefit the leadership styles that women already exhibit. Preliminary evidence is also provided which indicates that female managers are seen as more transformational than their male counterparts—a leadership style that has been shown to have a strong positive impact on individual, group, and organizational performance.

Health Promotion and Empowerment: Reflections on Professional Practice

Abstract: Recent reformulations of health promotion focus on empowerment as both a means and an end in health promotion practice. Both concepts, however, are rarely examined for their assumptions about social change processes or the potential of community groups, professionals, and institutions to create healthier living situations. This article attends to some of these assumptions, expressing ideas generated during 6 years of professional training workshops with over 2,500 community health practitioners in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. The article first argues that health promotion is not a social movement but a professional and bureaucratic response to the new knowledge challenges of social movements. As such, it has both empowering and disempowering aspects. The article analyzes empowerment as a dialectical relation in which power is simultaneously given and taken, and illustrates this in the context of health promotion programs. A model of an empowering professional (institutional) health promotion practice is presented, in which linkages among personal services, small group supports, community organizing, coalition advocacy, and political action are made explicit. Practice examples are provided to illustrate each level of the empowering relation, and the article concludes with a brief discussion of the model's educational and organizational utility.

New Health Promotion Movement: A Critical Examination

Abstract: In the last decade, a revolution has been occurring in the field of health promotion. Guided to a large extent by position papers disseminated by the World Health Organization (WHO) Europe Health Promotion Office, and furthered by the Ottawa Charter, the Epp Report in Canada, the Healthy Cities project, as well as by other efforts, this new health promotion movement has introduced new ideas, new language, and new concepts about what constitutes health and how health promotion efforts should be configured to achieve health. Punctuated by the terms like empowerment and community participation, this movement has generated a whole new discourse about the theory and practice of health promotion. This paper explores the multiple meanings that surround these terms, and the implications for practice, by addressing questions like: What does health mean in this new context? What is empowerment? What does participation look like? Has the tyranny of the professional been replaced by the tyranny of the community? Has anything changed about the practice of health promotion other than the language? Finally, it is argued that an acknowledgment of the multidimensionality of these concepts may facilitate their translation from rhetoric into health promotion practice.

Benefits of Participating in Research Interviews

Abstract: Interviews are a fundamental data collection method used in qualitative health research to help understand people's responses to illness or a particular situation. The risks associated with participating in 7 or 2 hour research interviews when a study focuses on vulnerable populations and sensitive issues are scrutinized by Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) and Human Subjects Committees. This paper shifts attention away from the risks to the benefits and describes catharsis, self-acknowledgment, sense of purpose, self-awareness, empowerment, healing, and providing a voice for the disenfranchised as the sometimes unanticipated benefits reported by interview participants

Introduction to Community Empowerment, Participatory Education, and Health

Abstract: Nina Wallerstein is Assistant Professor, Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Edward Bernstein is Associate Professor, Boston University School of Public Health, Boston City Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts. Address reprint requests to Nina Wallerstein, Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 8713

Measuring Community Competence in the Mississippi Delta: The Interface between Program Evaluation and Empowerment:

Abstract: If political dynamics are included in the definition of community, health promotion programs have a greater potential to recognize that assisting people to empower their communities is as important as assisting them to improve their health. This paper reports on the evaluation methods employed for a health promotion program in a rural poor county of the Mississippi Delta that chose to define community in this way. The evaluation took an action research approach so that the methods would not contradict or interfere with the program's empowerment agenda. The methods required a close and collaborative working relationship among evaluators and local service providers, community leaders, and program staff who defined and operationalized eight dimensions of community competence, determined the units of analysis, and developed the data collection protocol. Emphasis was placed on using the data to engage the program and three communities in a dialogue on how to confront a system with the difficult issues they faced. The findings revealed that after 1 year of implementation, community competence moved from social interactions internal to communities to those more externally focused on mediating with outside institutions and officials. At the same time, measures of self-other awareness and conflict containment showed a decrease or virtual nonexistence.

The Empowerment Tradition in American Social Work: A History

Abstract: Barbara Levy Simon argues that empowerment is only the latest term for a point of view that has been at the heart of social work since the 1890s. She presents the history of this tradition from 1893 to the present and explores the social movements, ideas, and beliefs that have been most influential in shaping its development. The empowerment perspective within social work practice seeks to help clients draw on personal, interpersonal and political strengths that enable them to gain greater control - both individually and collectively - over their environment and to attain their aspirations. Simon argues that the empowerment tradition developed among a diverse group of social work professionals who rejected the paternalistic approach to practice and shared a common commitment to enabling marginalized and impoverished people to help themselves, to claim their share of social, economic and political resources. She demonstrates that in every historical period the empowerment approach to practice included five basic processes: constructing collaborative partnerships with clients; emphasizing the strengths of clients rather than their incapacities; focusing on both individuals and their social and physical environments; recognizing the rights, responsibilities, and needs of clients and client groups; and directing professional energies toward helping historically disempowered groups and their members.

Empowerment in the Hospitality Industry: an Exploration of Antecedents and Outcomes:

Abstract: Does empowerment lead to positive employee outcomes? If so, to which antecedents should management turn in order to foster greater employee empow erment ? This study explored a number of potential ...

Assessing Client Strengths: Clinical Assessment for Client Empowerment

Abstract: The proposition that client strengths are central to the helping relationship is simple enough and seems uncontroversial as an important component of practice. Yet deficit, disease, and dysfunction metaphors are deeply rooted in clinical social work, and the emphasis of assessment has continued to be diagnosing abnormal and pathological conditions. This article argues that assessment in clinical practice, among other things, is a political activity. Assessment that focuses on deficits provides obstacles to client exercise of personal and social power and reinforces those social structures that generate and regulate unequal power relationships that victimize clients. Clinical practice based on metaphors of client strengths is also political in that it is congruent with the potential for client empowerment. This article discusses the importance of a client strengths perspective for assessment and proposes 12 practice guidelines that foster a strengths perspective.

Community Care: Policy and Practice

Abstract: Guide to Reading the Book - Introducing Community Care - From Institutions to Care in the Community: The History of Neglect - Community Care and the Restructuring of Welfare - Towards User and Carer Empowerment? - Leaders at Last?: The Changing Role of Social Services - The Health Dimension of Community Care:Towards Collaborative Working? - Housing and Community Care - European Perspectives on Community Care - Community Care in the 1990s: Achievements, Failures and Challenges for the Future

Women, Ethnicity and Empowerment:

Abstract: This article critically examines the ideology of empowerment and its links to debates about solidarity and difference among women, especially those from oppressed and minority collectivities. The n...

Transforming extension for sustainable agriculture: The case of integrated pest management in rice in Indonesia

Abstract: Investment in agricultural extension, as well as its design and practice, are usually based on the assumption that agricultural science generates technology ("applied science"), which extension experts transfer to "users". This model negates local knowledge and creativity, ignores farmers' self-confidence and social energy as important sources of change, and, in its most linear expression, does not pay attention to information from and about farmers as a condition for anticipating utilization. In practice, farmers rely on knowledge developed by farmers, reinvent ideas brought from outside and actively integrate them into complex farming decisions. Effective extension seems based on checks and balances that match intervention power with farmers' countervailing power, and mobilize farmers' creativity and participation in technology development and exchange. Alternative models for informing extension investment, design, and practice stress adult learning and its facilitation. The farmer is seen as an expert and farm development as driven by farmers' energy and communication. The article is a case study of a rare large scale attempt to use such an alternative model. It suggests that a shift to knowledgeintensive sustainable practices requires a learning process based on participation and empowerment.

A Case Study of Empowering Principal Behavior

Abstract: During the past decade there has been considerable criticism of administrative leadership behavior in schools. Criticism has focused on the hegemony of autocratic forms of leadership as well as on the manipulation inherent in leadership practices that “sell” leader-held conceptions of organization direction and practice to followers. Principals have been exhorted to empower teachers. However, much of the empowerment literature promotes a narrow conception of empowerment; more expansive constructs are long on concept and theory and short on field-based examples of principal behavior that inform practice. This study addresses this criticism by integrating an iteration of a recently developed theoretical empowerment framework with field-based data collected in a case study of one principal.

Defining teacher empowerment

Abstract: Problematic aspects of teachers' work have been noted in much of the literature on teaching. Some of these problems have their roots in the historical development of the teaching profession, and others are a result of the bureaucratic structure of schools. The literature on teacher work life identifies three significant problems with teachers' work in traditional American schools: teachers are isolated from colleagues in most of their work; and teachers have not been significantly involved in many of the decisions that affect the nature of their work, particularly in decisions made outside the classroom or the school. Empowerment has been defined as a process whereby school participants develop the competence to take charge of their own growth and resolve their own problems. Empowered individuals believe they have the skills and knowledge to act on a situation and improve it. Empowered schools are organizations that create opportunities for competence to be developed and displayed. Frymier (1987, p.9) states that "In any attempt to improve education, teachers are central." Rosenholtz (1991) suggests that ". . . the culture of a school changes significantly when experienced teachers stop functioning in isolation and start solving problems related to students' learning collectively." In any attempt to improve schools, attention must be given to roles in decision making and increased opportunities for meaningful, collective participation in the critical areas of activity in the organization which focus on organizational goals. Rappaport and his colleagues have described empowerment as a construct that tie personal competencies and abilities to environments that provide opportunities for choice and autonomy in demonstrating those competencies (Zimmerman & Rappaport, 1988). Dunst (1991) has suggested that empowerment consists of two issues: (1) enabling experiences, provided within an organization that fosters autonomy, choice, control, and responsibility, which 2) allow the individual to display existing competencies as well as learn new competencies that support an strengthen functioning. School restructuring has, as one of its components, the empowerment of teachers, administrators, and students (Murphy & Evertson, 1990; Short et al, 1991). In fact, the restructuring paradigm of Murphy and Evertson includes empowerment as an integral part of reform. There are six empirically-derived set of dimensions of teacher empowerment that help define the construct and broaden the dialogue beyond the rhetoric of empowerment. These dimensions were derived from research in the "The Empowered School District Project," conducted on school empowerment in nine school districts across the country from 1989 to 1992. What are the Dimensions of Teacher Empowerment? Teacher empowerment is a complex construct. While empowerment generally is associated with site-based management and shared decision making, research in the "Empowered School District Project" revealed that the underlying dimensions of the construct are varied and informative. The six dimensions of teacher empowerment found in the study include the following: Involvement in decision making, teacher impact, teacher status, autonomy, opportunities for professiona development, and teacher self-efficacy. Decision Making This dimensions of empowerment relates to the participation of teachers in critical decisions that directly affect their work. In many cases, this means participation in and responsibility for decisions involving budgets, teacher selection, scheduling, curriculum, and other programmatic areas. Providing teachers with a significant role in school decision making is a key element in empowerment. Teachers gain the opportunity to increase control over their work environment. However, for teacher involvement in decision making to happen, teachers must believe that their involvement is genuine and that their opinion has critical impact in the outcome of the decision (Short & Greet, 1989). …

Women's interests and empowerment: gender planning reconsidered.

Abstract: This article looks at the empowerment approach in relation to issues of women and development. After explaining why this is currently the most fruitful perspective in the field of gender planning, it then goes on to explore two central problems of the empowerment approach. The first problem is the conceptualization of women's gender interests. The distinction between women's practical and strategic gender interests was introduced by Molyneux and popularized by Moser. It is argued here that this distinction is theoretically unfounded and empirically untenable. Secondly, gender planners tend towards a preference for simplified tools and quantifiable targets. Here it is argued that women's realities should not be bent into this planning framework but that instead planners, working from an empowerment perspective, should demonstrate flexibility and theoretical grounding, and be aware of the political dimensions of their work.

Health Care Reform Based on an Empowerment Model of Recovery by People With Psychiatric Disabilities

Abstract: People witb psycbiatric disabilities have articulated a model of recovery that encourages their empowerment by emphasizing consumerdefined goals, liberty, self-control of symptoms, peer support, elimination of discrimination, and provision of adequate material and social supports. Application of this model to health care reform requires public education to fight discrimination, an end to the use of involuntary interventions in the name of treatment, further development of services run by sur-vivors-consumers and other alternatives topsychiatric hospitalization, and increased involvement of sur-vivors-consumers in decisions related to their treatment and support. To promote empowerment of people with mental health problems, health care reform should include affordable, universal coverage without exclusions for preexisting high-risk conditions, parity of mental health benefits with other benefits, which includes coverage for voluntary services only, and incentives for funding long-term care, alternatives to...