View Of Empowerment Research Articles

Interaction Empowerment in Mobile Health: Concepts, Challenges, and Perspectives.

In its most trending interpretation, empowerment in health care is implemented as a patient-centered approach. In the same sense, many mobile health (mHealth) apps are being developed with a primary focus on the individual user. The integration of mHealth apps into the health care system has the potential to counteract existing challenges, including incomplete or nonstandardized medical data and lack of communication, especially in the intersectional context (eg, patients, medical forces). However, concerns about data security and privacy, regional differences in regulations, lack of accessibility, and nontransparent apps hinder the successful integration of mHealth into the health care system. One approach to address this is to rethink the interpretation of empowerment. On that basis, we here examine existing approaches of individual empowerment and subsequently analyze a different view of empowerment in digital health, namely interaction empowerment. Such a change of perspective could positively influence intersectoral communication and facilitate secure data and knowledge sharing. We discuss this novel viewpoint on empowerment, focusing on more efficient integration and development of mHealth approaches. A renewed interpretation of empowerment could thus buffer current limitations of individual empowerment while also advancing digitization of the health system.

Rethinking community empowerment in the energy transformation: A critical review of the definitions, drivers and outcomes

Empowering communities to engage with the energy transformation is vital to meet climate change mitigation and sustainable development goals. Communities have a key role to play in the energy transformation, through the uptake of new technologies and changing how they engage with energy. However, they remain marginalised limiting the broader benefits of meaningful participation such as energy democracy, energy justice and energy citizenship, which may be achieved through transformation. Addressing this problem requires an understanding of how to facilitate empowerment. Using a multidisciplinary approach, this paper synthesises the literature on community empowerment for sustainable transformations. It outlines a conceptualisation of empowerment through its definition, drivers and outcomes. Community empowerment in the energy transformation should be about the community’s own goals and transformative action. This view of empowerment can be enabled through a variety of different drivers. Empowerment is identified as a multifaceted concept associated with a range of different outcomes such as participation, agency, autonomy and power-shift. Whilst the four outcomes identified in this review are typically described in isolation; we suggest that they are instead a scale wherein each step is a form of empowerment in its own right and yet represents an overall trajectory of empowerment. Facilitating community empowerment within the energy transformation requires a shift in both research and practice.

Relationality and Economic Empowerment: The Role of Men in Supporting and Undermining Women’s Pathways

Within development projects, empowerment is often construed in narrow terms, and increasingly in relation to economic empowerment. Feminist scholars have recently argued the need to bring back a more encompassing view of empowerment, which pays greater attention to relationality and changes in consciousness. In this article, we focus on one aspect of relationality – women’s relationships with men. Drawing on three case studies of women’s business success in Papua New Guinea, we argue men are pivotal in supporting and undermining women’s economic opportunities. Offering support to recent work on women’s empowerment which emphasizes both women’s relationships with men, and the specificity of contexts into account, our article contributes to current debates in gender and development.

Multiple Temporalities of Household Labour: The Challenge of Assessing Women's Empowerment

ABSTRACTThe economic empowerment of women remains a central feature of development projects worldwide. This article explores these empowerment aspirations by examining various temporal complexities related to two development projects in South India targeting individual cooking and fuel‐collection routines. It argues that three temporal considerations of household labour — polychronic time, collectivized time and hybrid labour/leisure time — are largely overlooked, thus challenging the appropriateness of empowerment strategies from the outset. By highlighting key household dynamics this study argues that efforts to pursue economic empowerment by members of the clean cookstove sector devalue unpaid labour and glorify waged work that is often tedious and mediated by powerful men. Further, waged work can be burdensomely added to pre‐existing unpaid domestic labour responsibilities. This common portrayal of empowerment by the clean cookstove sector can be viewed as facilitating the advancement of a neoliberal vision of rural women's livelihoods where empowerment and agency are reconfigured and incorporated into the problematic wage relations of capitalist economies. This view of empowerment, which privileges market participation, also overlooks many of the actually experienced positive effects of improved stoves; benefits which tend to be domestic, communal, routine, non‐economic and difficult to quantify. The article argues that conventional definitions and visions of ‘empowerment’ should be re‐evaluated to include forms of ‘mundane agency’.

The limitations of Inclusive Research in practice: reappraising the ‘sympathetic researcher’ role in applied theatre research

ABSTRACTThose who champion Inclusive Research techniques have often viewed the role of the ‘sympathetic researcher’ in studies that engage people with learning disabilities with suspicion. I argue that the rejection of this role is based on a simplistic view of empowerment, and risks reinforcing power hierarchies between researcher and subject. This article repositions the role of ‘sympathetic researcher’ and argues that a more pragmatic approach to the use of Inclusive Research techniques can create a broader platform from which the voices of people with learning disabilities can be heard.

Crystalline Empowerment: Negotiating Tensions in Refugee Resettlement

As the number of forcibly displaced people continues to rise worldwide, humanitarian organizations are playing a growing role in finding solutions. This study investigates one of the world’s largest refugee resettlement organizations as it pilots innovative empowerment programs. With very little research regarding organizational rhetoric, discourse, and practices within resettlement agencies, there is great need for understanding the tensions that arise amid empowerment processes. This participant ethnography identifies distinct formations of empowerment and disempowerment. The analysis identifies tensions between (1) active/passive and (2) material/symbolic interpretations of empowerment, as well as (3) the enabling/constraining effects of communication technologies. The metaphor, crystalline empowerment, is introduced to connect a tension-centered approach with a view of empowerment that prioritizes organic, contingent interpretations while identifying practical opportunities for inclusion and agency in resettlement contexts.

Beyond “Empowerment”? Sexuality in a Sexist World

The subject of girls’ sexual empowerment is a fertile area for feminist debate. While most feminists are committed to the promotion of diverse and egalitarian sexual possibilities for girls (and women), we differ in our views on how to hold an aspirational vision alongside paying attention to real world constraints on its unfolding. A specific instance of this tension is posed in considering how relevant claims to individual empowerment are within a broader context that remains broadly sexist and limiting as well as saturated with racist and other forms of discrimination and inequality. In this paper, I join the dialogue opened by Lamb and Peterson (2011) to explore some of these questions. I argue that the concept of sexual empowerment, as taken up in these debates, might be too flexible to do the work we require of it. In particular, I suggest that it is unhelpful to fix our lens on claims of individual empowerment, if and where this involves eliding the broader sociocultural conditions of possibility for “intimate justice” (McClelland 2010) for girls and women; and, where it leads us to over-ride the psychosocial complexity of all individuals in ways that distract us from attending to ambivalence and understanding the “cruel attachments” that can bind us to injustice. Rather than seeking to offer an “‘expert’ view of empowerment,” I argue for the value of reflexive, empathic, and respectful feminist critique of the cultural conditions of possibility for such a thing.

Analyzing empowerment: An ongoing process of building state–civil society relations – The case of Walnut Way in Milwaukee

Arguments regarding citizen involvement and empowerment within neoliberal urban politics are ample in geographic literature. Existing discussions often define and evaluate empowerment as either some social, political, or economic end-product of a specific event. Such singular conceptualization is problematic. First, different kinds of social, political, and economic changes can simultaneously empower/disempower communities in contradictory ways. In addition, the view of empowerment as an end-product of a present event obscures a more nuanced understanding of empowerment as an ongoing process of state–civil society relation-building. An in-depth assessment of such a process is only possible with reference to the past and the potential future occurrences. Elwood’s (2002) multi-dimensional conceptualization of empowerment recognizes the limitations of a singular definition of empowerment. However, it falls short of operationalizing empowerment as a temporal process with a historically and geographically contingent past, dynamic present, and future in the making. Therefore, in this paper I expand on Elwood’s framework to show how a process-based view as opposed to a narrow end-product-based or event-based one can provide a deeper understanding of state–civil society interaction and community empowerment. This paper analyzes the interaction between the City of Milwaukee, the residents of a predominantly black inner-city neighborhood, the Walnut Way, and their community organization, the Walnut Way Conservation Corp. within a land-use dispute related to the development of a park space into a housing project. Using data collected through semi-structured in-depth interviews, archival research, and participant observation, this paper emphasizes that despite methodological limitations of collecting long-term data, community empowerment can and should be studied as a process with reference to the past, present, and potential future state–civil society interactions.

Empowerment: In Search of a Viable Paradigm

The word “empowerment” is associated with several different and fundamentally inadequate paradigms. This paper presents an alternative, empowering view of empowerment. The essence of empowerment is increasing the behavior potential of persons, individually and in groups and organizations. Behavior potential is not some abstract concept of “what a person might do if” Instead, it is the totality of behaviors that are actually available to a given person in a given environment. These behaviors do not occur in a vacuum; behavior potential is the intersection of the person's behavioral productions with the organization's expectations and permissions. An individual is empowered to the extent that he or she possesses a rich repertoire of behaviors and is expected and permitted to make full use of this repertoire by the organization.

Power to People with Disabilities: Empowerment issues in employment programming

ABSTRACT A view of empowerment that focuses exclusively or primarily on increasing the personal or individual power of people with disabilities violates the spirit of the disability rights movement which is a political movement organizing for social change. A view of empowerment more in keeping with the political organizing and protest that generated interest in empowerment focuses on the acquisition of social forms of power, especially power with which is an egalitarian social power based in individuals acting together as equal partners. An understanding of the importance of power with as a basis for empowerment is useful in developing empowering and effective employment programs for people with severe disabilities. Examples of employment programs based in power with are described including self-managed work crews, and businesses owned and operated co-operatively by people with disabilities.

A Health Service and Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Partnership to Develop and Plan Mental Health Services

The aim of this study was to examine the effects of an action research partnership between the Tweed Valley Health Service (TVHS) and the Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander community for the development and delivery of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Mental Health Services. This partnership was based upon Labonte's (1989) view of empowerment where it is suggested that to be empowered means to have increased capacity to define, analyse and act upon one's problems. It was proposed that the establishment of a 'partnership' based upon these principles would assist in operationalising Indigenous community participation in TVHS planning. To achieve this type of 'partnership', the health service had to be willing to enter the partnership and to give the authority to the Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Health Outcome Council to seek and trial solutions on Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Mental Health matters. Key outcomes were defined as the extent to which the re-organised services proved to be acceptable and utilised by the local Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander population. Outcomes were operationalised through measures of service utilisation and consumer satisfaction with accessibility, process and outcomes. The study trialed participatory action research as a method for Indigenous participation in Mental Health Service planning and development and concludes that it is a valid model for cross cultural research and health service development in a complex medical setting.

Theoretical considerations of employee empowerment within computer integrated manufacturing production

Global business pressures have forced manufacturers to restructure design and production processes, adopting radically different management practices to gain competitive advantage. Employee empowerment continues to receive attention as a means of effectively appropriating and deploying human skills and knowledge. Employees are seen as critical components of the innovation‐led model of manufacturing which is evolving in response to unstable markets. This paper explores the concept of empowerment and conditions for its effective realisation in Computer Integrated Manufacturing production. Existing theory which underpins the authors’ view of empowerment is considered as a framework to facilitate further investigation of empowerment in Computer Integrated Manufacturing.

Whatever it Takes? Managing `Empowered' Employees and the Service Encounter in an International Hotel Chain

In an attempt to encourage employee discretion and self-direction many luxury international hotels are turning to employee empowerment strategies as a solution. These are based on the assumption that 'most employess can make good decisions if they are properly socialised, trained and informed. They can be internally motivated to perform effectively, and they are capable of self-control and self-direction' (Bowen and Lawler 1992: 35). Empowerment is represented as a fundamental break with the systems-driven approach of the past, and to be indicative of a looser and more normatively-based integration via corporate cultures and philosophies (Barge 1993) in which 'the ideas, beliefs and values of the firm influence employees to act in customer oriented ways' (Bowen and Basch 1992: 212). In the rest of the this paper we explore the way in which managers in one internationalising hotel chain, which we have called Americo, are trying to operationalise a corporate ideology in which employee empowerment is a central component of an overall Total Quality Management (TQM) strategy. We will first outline the corporate view of empowerment at Americo before going on to consider the more diffuse mechanisms of control that similarly underpin the corporate philosophy of 'doing whatever it takes' in an attempt by the company to ensure that these apparently contradictory customer demands are met.

Empowerment Issues in Services to Individuals With Disabilities

"Empowerment" has become a widely used term in discussions of disability and rehabilitation issues. However, the term has been given a confusing variety of meanings and interpretations. The meanings and some conflicting views of empowerment are reviewed. We argue that there is a great deal more clarity regarding how disability services currently limit empowerment than about what empowerment is, and we outline five core features of disability services which are said to be disempowering. Elements of a service system that overcome these limitations and promote empowerment are presented. Incorporating these elements will require a more radical restructuring of current service systems than many have supposed.