ABSTRACT
Empowerment, or the attempt to help others to develop and express their full potential, making of them autonomous subjects, is of key relevance both in New Management and in social generativity – where it’s called “authorization”. Yet, a deeper analysis reveals radical differences in the ways the notion is articulated in these two domains. In New Management, and in particular in coaching – one of its most important managerial strategies – it is in fact strictly connected with four implications that are unrelated to social generativity: the individualization and psychologization of work experience, the paradoxical injunction of autonomy, the epistemological regress in the understanding of organizational phenomena and the functionalization and exploitations of emotions. After analysing how the first three implications of empowerment appear in the discourse of coaching, the chapter will propose the main result of an empirical research aiming at comparing how emotions are conceived and handled in New Management and in the generativity-driven organizations included in the “Archivio della Generatività Sociale”.
