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The concept of empowerment became more popular in the 1990s as an attempt to replace the concept of “participation”, which gradually lost its popularity since the 1980s due to its lack of authenticity. Unauthentic participation is a situation where people could “participate” in a project without having the power to decide on the critical issues related to the project (Gergis, 1999:3). Therefore, Empowerment attempts to foster meaningful or authentic participation, where decisions are made by people who have to bear the consequences of the same (McArdle, 1989). The implication here is that “it is not the achievement of goals, as much as the process of deciding that is important” (Gergis, 1999: 6). This is to say, empowerment goes a step further than participation because in the latter is wider in scope, encompassing both the weak and strong forms of participation. People can participate in a given process or activity while they do not actually have the power to make critical decisions pertaining to the activity or process they are involved in. Empowerment is concerned with the strong forms of participation, trying to see into it that people are fully involved at every stage of development intervention; namely, identification of need, identification of options/strategies, decision making/choice of action, mobilization of resources and action itself (Onyx and Benton, 1995). However, empowerment and participation are very much linked. In a sense, the two concepts in development discourse are inseparable. That is, empowering people means promoting opportunities for their participation. On the other hand, for participation to be meaningful, people must be empowered to enable them contribute fully in the development process (Sidorenko, 2006). Empowerment and participation of citizens can be exercised in the economic, social, or political spheres; at the individual, family, community, national and global levels. Clearly, people are empowered through participation in decision making.
In the perspective of work organizations, the concept of empowerment has also been associated with popular management movements of the times such as HRM[ Human Resource Management] and TQM[ Total Quality Management] of the 1980s as an attempt to address the chronic problems of Taylorism and bureaucracy which dominated the workplaces (Wilkinson, 1998). Although the scientific management theory by F.W. Taylor[ Taylor is respected as ‘the father of scientific management’. Under his management system, factories are managed through scientific methods rather than by use of the empirical ‘rule of thumb’ so widely prevalent in the days of the late nineteenth century when F. W. Taylor devised his system and published ‘Scientific Management’ in 1911. ] was very successful in terms of increasing productivity,代写留学作业提供代写Essay，代写Assignment，请联系QQ：949925041 workers’ dissatisfaction was immense as reflected in high labour turnover, absenteeism and conflict. It is the work of Elton Mayo[ Elton Mayo conducted the popular Hawthorne experiments (1927 -1932) where he found that work satisfaction is enhanced, to a large extent, by the informal social relationships between workers in a group and upon the social relationships between workers and their bosses. The effects of the group should never be underestimated. |
