ABSTRACT

Shared meanings are essential for organisation. In order to be able to coordinate their actions, members of the organisation should use shared language and make sense of events and activities in a similar way. The chapter analyses organisational learning as a search for a shared meaning of empowerment in World Vision Finland and its partners in Kenya, Uganda, India and Sri Lanka in the context of organisational workshops. The chapter analyses scripts of NGO workshops and a variety of schemata of empowerment emerging in the organisational discussions. The chapter shows how institutionalised learning events tend to reinforce the organisational roles and meanings rather than provide spaces for their modification and critical reflection. It also illustrates how organisational schemata of empowerment include tensions between understanding empowerment as an intervention approach or an indigenous process, between the locus of empowerment in individuals or communities, and between empowerment being merely a change in structural power relations or an increase in individual strengths.