ABSTRACT
The concept of empowerment has had its share of exponents of its virtues. Theoreticians, researchers and, in the UK, official guidance on the implementation of the NHS and Community Care Act 1990, contribute to the rhetoric concerning its use. But there are significant constraints on its practice. These provide a counterpoint for the opportunities for empowerment alleged to exist by officials and professionals, in the domains of politics, policies, service organisations, professions, individual workers, service users and carers.
Two such constraints are examined in this chapter. First, a notable schism exists between the literature concerning anti-oppression and anti-discrimination, and that on empowerment. The former, whilst not always being ‘top-down’, focuses often enough on the impact of structural inequalities and divisions; the latter, while not always beginning with the individual, deals exhaustively with individual and group-based empowerment. Second, the literature concerning individual and collective empowerment relates at best tangentially, and more often not at all to the area of challenges or protests by people. Such happenings are routinely ignored, misrepresented, under-explained, or subsumed under other phenomena.
This chapter explores the case for reconceptualising the contribution of the person receiving services, so as to make individual and collective challenges by people, and in particular collective protest, part of the mainstream of the agency’s activities, rather than constituting the periphery, or even being treated as an excluded activity.
The final section of this chapter considers strategies by which those engaged in social work may address these shortcomings.
