Empowerment

Introduction

Empowerment is both a multilevel (individual, group, organizational, community) and a multidimensional (intrapersonal, social, behavioural, organizational and community) construct. It has been defined as a process through which people, organizations and communities gain mastery over their own affairs. Empowerment is a construct that links individual competencies, existing helping systems and proactive behaviours to matters of social policy and social change. The individual experience of empowerment includes a combination of self-acceptance and self-confidence, social and political understanding and the ability to play an assertive role in controlling resources and decisions in one's community. Psychological empowerment can be described therefore as the connection between a sense of personal competence, a desire for, and a willingness to take, action in the public domain (Zimmerman & Rappaport, 1988).

In the last decades the concept of empowerment has been widely used cross-culturally in five different domains: politics, adult education, health, management and organizational and community psychology (Piccardo, 1995). In this entry, I will briefly describe how the construct of empowerment has been applied in different fields, and how it has been defined and assessed at the individual, group, organizational and community levels.

In politics, the construct was first proposed in the context of the civil rights and women's liberation movements of the 1960s. It meant giving more legal, political and economic power to people who had less access to valued resources. Since then, empowerment has become one of the main aims of all intervention programmes carried out in developing countries or in disadvantaged areas of rich nations. Empowerment has become a key concept also in the environmental movement and in many projects aimed at fostering the rights of oppressed groups (Francescato, 2000; Human, 1990).

In the field of adult education, empowerment has become a cornerstone in lifelong learning projects, aimed at favouring personal growth and at increasing active participation of trainees in defining training goals and processes. Empowering in education means shifting the power from teacher to trainees, so these can make the choices that are more relevant to their emancipation (Bruscaglioni, 1994).

In the health field, empowerment has been used to indicate the process by which patients become less dependent on doctors, acquire the skills and knowledge necessary to take care of their health, and become aware of the social and environmental factors impinging on their individual well-being. (Hess, 1984; McWhirter, 1991; Pasini & Francescato, 2001; Wilkinson, 1996).

In management and organizational psychology empowerment has been used to promote a shift in organizational values, moving away from bureaucratic paternalistic culture and promoting an entrepreneurial-emancipatory environment which allows workers to participate more in [Page 362]decision making, and to share risks and rewards (Putnam, 1991; Piccardo, 1995).

In community psychology, empowerment is a value orientation for working in the community, that directs attention to promoting wellness instead of preventing illness, identify strengths instead of cataloguing risk factors and enhance assets instead of solving problems. According to Zimmerman (2000) empowerment is a continuous variable, a developmental construct that can change over time, and it is context and population specific. Finally, empowerment is an individual-level construct when one is concerned with intrapersonal and behavioural variables, an organizational-level construct when one is concerned with resource mobilization and participatory opportunities and a community-level construct when sociopolitical structures and social change are involved. Three concepts can be applied across levels of analysis to understand empowered processes and outcomes for individuals, groups, organizations and communities: control, critical awareness and participation. Control refers to perceived or actual capacity to influence decisions. Critical awareness refers to understanding how the power structures operate, how decisions are made, causal agents influenced and resources mobilized. Participation refers to taking action promoting desired outcomes.

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