Speaking truth to power: Empowerment ideology as social intervention and policy

Perkins, Douglas D. American Journal of Community Psychology. New York: Oct

1995. Vol. 23, Iss. 5; pg. 765, 30 pgs

Abstract (Summary)
Perkins outlines some of the areas of community, organizational, and societal level
social intervention and policy ostensibly based on the concept of empowerment.

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Copyright Plenum Publishing Corporation Oct 1995

The popularity, and subsequent ambiguity, in the use of the term "empowerment" has
created an even greater need for reassessment in the applied context than in the theory
and research literatures. This paper outlines some of the areas of community,
organizational, and societal level social intervention and policy ostensibly based on the
concept of empowerment. These include neighborhood voluntary associations (for
environmental protection, community crime prevention, etc.), self-help groups,
competence-building primary prevention, organizational management, health care and
educational reforms, and national and international community service and community
development policies. Issues in applying social research to community organizations
and to legislative and administrative policy making are reviewed. Ten recommendations
are offered, including the value of a dialectical analysis, for helping researchers and
policy makers/administrators make more effective use of empowerment theory and
research.

Humpty Dumpty: "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean neither
more nor less."

King of Hearts: "If there's no meaning in it, that saves a world of trouble, you know, as
we needn't try to find any." - Lewis Carroll

In the years since Solomon (1976) recommended an empowerment approach to social

work in African American communities, P. L. Berger and Neuhaus (1977) used the term
as a guide for reforming public policy, Rappaport (1981) issued his paradoxical call for
adopting a social policy of empowerment over prevention, and researchers, program
administrators, and policy makers across the country have grabbed the empowerment
banner and are flying it proudly. In 1984, Rappaport admitted that "we do not know
what empowerment is, but like obscenity, we know it when we see it" (p. 2). To most
people, it is a vague buzz word heard in political, community development,
management, or therapeutic-wellness circles. Burns (1992) and others have shown how
keeping the exact application of an ideology ambiguous can enhance its power, which
may explain some of empowerment's enduring strength and appeal. But ambiguity
ultimately inhibits the development of theory, scientific understanding, and sound
program planning and policy making.
This paper outlines some of the areas of community, organizational, or societal-level
social intervention (i.e., programs) and policy (i.e., an official course of action) in which
the use of the concept of, or at least the term, empowerment has become omnipresent in
recent years. It concludes with some analysis and recommendations regarding the policy
application of social science with the goal of helping researchers to help policy makers
and program administrators move toward more effective use of empowerment theory
and research, as opposed to rhetoric.

Perkins and Zimmerman (1995) described the explosion of empowerment research in

recent years. Little of this was policy research, however (i.e., research evaluating
particular past, present, or proposed policies). Yet empowerment programs and policies
have proliferated and enjoyed uncommon bipartisan support. Conservatives view these
policies as private voluntarism that reduce the role and size of government, while
liberals see them as a way of reviving public support for VISTA, urban renewal,
antipoverty, and virtually every other government program they favor.

A computer search found that the root word empower was used in 360 different White
House press releases, speeches, and policy statements from January 1992 through
August 1994, and, as evidenced by President Clinton's 1995 State of the Union Address,
the frequency is clearly increasing. It was also found in 293 U.S. House and Senate bills
introduced in the first 1 1/2 years of the 103rd Congress; in 3,769 different items in the
Congressional Record between 1985 and August 1994; and in over 7,000 state house
bills from 1991 through 1994. But many of these legislative bills use the term solely in
its original legal, that is, more specific and literal, meaning ("to give power or control to,
to authorize, enable, or permit").

The present review focuses on programmatic applications of community and

psychological empowerment, which are defined here as ones that use the language of
empowerment and encourage, or claim to encourage, individual and community control
over the planning and implementation of solutions to individually and locally felt
problems, typically by decentralizing decisionmaking authority. These may be (but are
very often not) an outgrowth of the legal empowerment of a local, state, or national
entity.

The following review is intended to illustrate the breadth and scope of social
interventions that are ostensibly based on empowerment concepts. Other articles in this
issue give the reader more depth on specific approaches. The review includes small-
scale grass-roots settings (e.g., local community development, environmental action,
and crime prevention organizations and self-help and women's consciousness raising
groups), competence-building primary prevention programs (e.g., Head Start),
organizational management reforms (e.g., participatory workplace democracy),
institutional reforms in health care and education, and national and foreign policies (e.g.,
community service, welfare reform, economic development, civil/political rights, and
neoconservative uses of empowerment), all of which rely heavily on empowerment
ideology. The present journal issue aside, the available literature on these interventions,
especially at higher levels of policy making, rarely defines empowerment or its relevant
dimensions clearly, or uses it consistently or measures it as an outcome.

EMPOWERMENT INTERVENTIONS AND POLICIES

Grass-Roots Settings

Interventions that "act" small and locally, even as they "think" more globally, are often
the most effective (Weick, 1984). Small-scale, local, alternative, empowerment-oriented
support and advocacy interventions include community development, environmental
action, community crime prevention, and self-help and consciousness-raising groups.

Community Development

Community development (CD) organizations are an especially appropriate yet varied

example of empowerment-based interventions and so are examined in some detail. They
include building, block, neighborhood, or village resident associations that work,
usually in cooperation with local government agencies, to improve the social, physical,
and economic environment of the community, and to empower residents to gain control
over local quality-of-life problems. Some CD organizations focus on one issue, such as
crime (see Community Crime Prevention, below), economic development (see
discussion of international CD and Empowerment Zones, below) or housing (e.g.,
Neighborhood Housing Services, Inc.; Habitat for Humanity; Leavitt and Saegert's,
1990, Community Household Model). But the most enduring CD organizations may be
multi-issue ones that are flexible enough to address whatever community problems arise.

Citizen participation in local CD and other grass-roots organizations can be viewed as

an integral component or important behavioral exemplar of individual empowerment
(Zimmerman, 1995). It may be more accurate to think of participation as a cause and
effect of empowerment. In either case, the two concepts are closely linked at all levels,
from individual to organizational and community. In 1984, Kieffer observed that the
participation and community organizing literatures had generally ignored issues of
individual empowerment. This has begun to change. Community psychologists have
studied the development of leadership and empowerment in churches, schools, and
voluntary block and neighborhood associations (Florin & Wandersman, 1990; Maton &
Rappaport, 1984; Serrano-Garcia, 1984; Speer & Hughey, 1995).

Focusing on citizen participation as a form of empowerment is valuable in research and

intervention for three reasons. First, as a behavior, participation can be more directly,
and therefore reliably, measured than intrapsychic dimensions of empowerment. Second,
participation forces psychologists to consider empowerment at various levels of analysis
(individual, organization, community). In fact, research on participation in grass-roots
organizations in three cities has found both community-focused cognitions and
behaviors and aggregated community-level (climate) variables to be better predictors of
participation than is individual locus of control (Perkins, Brown, & Taylor, 1995). Third,
a focus on participation (ie., people's direct interactions with their neighbors, the
community environment, local organizations, and government agencies) highlights the
need to understand how those factors affect and are affected by empowerment (Perkins,
Florin, Rich, Wandersman, & Chavis, 1990).

Empowerment in the CD and many other contexts entails a process and ideology of
oppositional dialectics, a method of interpretation associated with Hegel in which an
assertable thesis is contrasted with an equally assertable, but apparently contradictory,
antithesis until the paradox is resolved at a higher level of understanding by a synthesis
that embraces both assertions simultaneously.
There are many such dialectics in the realm of CD. "One's autonomy is limited by the
autonomy asserted by others; self-reliance takes place in a context of interdependence,
participatory democracy at the base is engaged in the larger processes of representative
governance; experienced-based learning is in creative tension with theoretical
knowledge" (Friedmann, 1992, p. viii).

The most critical tension may be the need to elicit greater participation in CD
organizations for the personal, organizational, and community benefits that come with
participation (thesis), while avoiding the frustration, disappointment, and burnout that
are so prevalent among active participants and leaders (antithesis). One synthesis, of
course, is for community leaders to train, delegate to, and develop new leadership.
Another possible synthesis would be the realization that it is not necessarily wrong for a
voluntary association to have a period of inactivity, especially if it has been successful.
The leaders can use the organizational dormancy to learn from any mistakes and to
rejuvenate themselves for the next mobilization. To adapt a particular dialectic from
Eastern philosophy, that which does not kill the leader and organization makes them
stronger.

Other dialectics inherent in empowerment via CD are similar to those involved in

residents' attachment to place (Brown & Perkins, 1992). These include the tensions
between individual identity and interests and community identity and interests and
between change and stability at the levels of individual, household, community, and
culture. Another paradox of CD concerns the role of the church, a traditionally
conservative institution, in empowering individuals and communities in this country
(Maton & Rappaport, 1984), especially in African American communities, and in the
Liberation Theology movement in Latin American (Gutierrez, 1973).

Aside from Kroeker's (1993) study of individual and organizational empowerment in a

Nicaraguan agricultural cooperative, psychologists have paid little attention to
international CD. Empowerment has become the premier paradigm for CD programs
and policies abroad, especially in the Third World. A 1990 issue of the international
Community Development Journal was devoted to the theme of empowerment, as have
been hundreds of individual articles in that and other CD journals and many recent
books (e.g., Friedmann, 1992). One of the few things most delegates to the 1994 United
Nations Population Conference in Cairo could agree on was that policies focusing on
the empowerment of women in developing countries are needed to help decrease the
birth rate.

A growing number of international experts see the social and political empowerment of
the poor as the basis for an alternative grass-roots model of global political and
economic development. This represents a major departure from the traditional model,
which emphasizes rapid, often unsustainable, economic growth based on
environmentally harmful industrialization and urbanization (Friedmann, 1992). The
empowerment approach to development "places the emphasis on autonomy in the
decision-making of territorially organized communities, local self-reliance . . .. direct
(participatory) democracy,and experiential social learning. Its starting point is locality,
because civil society is most readily mobilized around local issues" (pp. vii-viii).

In practice, independent and unmediated community-based action is difficult to find or

achieve. Most CD programs are either concerned with corporate growth and
macroeconomic indicators (the traditional model) or rely heavily on centralized and
bureaucratic nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) which mediate between the state
and the poor. From an empowerment perspective, NGOs may be necessary, but like the
state, they should not usurp local initiatives, but enable and support them.

That is why Friedmann centers his empowerment model on the household rather than on
higher levels of production or profit. He seeks to empower households and their
members three ways: socially, politically, and psychologically. "Social power is
concerned with access to certain 'bases' of household production, such as information,
knowledge and skills, participation in social organizations, and financial resources"
(Friedmann, 1992, p. 33, italics added). Political power concerns access to decision
making that affects one's own future. For Friedmann, psychological empowerment
involves individual self-efficacy, self-confidence, and successful action in the social and
political domains (which, along with participatory skills, fits Zimmerman and
Rappaport's (1988) definition of the term).

The 25th anniversary issue of the Community Development Journal took stock of past,
present, and future CD practices and research and chose a single word to reflect the
direction of CD throughout the world: empowerment. The editors point to the field's
development toward community initiatives and democratic community participation in
partnership with, rather than programs planned and led by, states and NGOs as
manifesting the guiding value of empowerment (Craig, Mayo, & Taylor, 1990). They
further demonstrate the cross-disciplinary attraction of empowerment as a concept, but
in so doing, they also demonstrate the lack of discipline among social scientists,
generally, to try to define and use it clearly.

One of the few attempts to measure empowerment as an outcome revealed that it was
not an objective of past large-scale international CD projects, even among those with an
element of community participation. Paul (1986, as cited in Stein, 1990) reviewed more
than 40 community participatory CD projects financed by the World Bank and
concluded that empowerment, defined as the equitable sharing of power and the process
by which weaker groups acquire higher levels of political awareness and strengths, was
a goal of only 3 of them. Even where it has been a clear objective, however (e.g., in El
Salvador), empowerment (via consciousness raising and increasing negotiating power
vis-a-vis the state) is seen as a long-run objective and part of a dilemma as it competes
with the short-run objective of improving basic living conditions in the community
(Stein, 1990). Aside from the statement on population control (above), it is apparently
not viewed dialectically as the critical means toward achieving even the short-run
objective, that is as part and parcel of the process and not a dilemma at all.

One important implication of this interest in empowerment among international CD

workers and researchers is methodological. The bottom line of interest to sponsors such
as the World Bank has been economic. And so CD project evaluations have
traditionally been based on quantitative economic efficiency analyses. Although an
economic model of CD can be empowering (Vindhya & Kalpana, 1989), an
empowerment approach to CD addresses the social, physical, and political as well as
economic context. Measuring these and the process of change ideally require the
inclusion of qualitative research methods (Bamberger, 1990; Kieffer, 1984; Kroeker,
1993; Maton & Salem, 1995).
Environmental Empowerment

The physical environment is an important locus of both causes and effects of people's
empowerment and participation. The environmental catalyst for participation may be as
subtle and seemingly trivial as the poor condition of your neighbor's house (Perkins et
al., 1990) or neighborhood children and parents participating in the design of a new
playground (Hester, 1987). Or it may be as dramatic as a toxic hazard (Rich, Edelstein,
Hallman, & Wandersman, 1995) or a large-scale housing or other community planning
project (Churchman, 1990).

Edelstein (1988) took a dialectical approach to analyzing community environmental

disempowerment. He showed how the typical governmental response to an
environmental threat disables rather than empowers citizens, who are caught in a series
of double binds. For example, victimized families and communities are often too much
at risk to live a normal life but not enough so to warrant definitive governmental action.
They cannot sell their homes, but the government will not buy them out. If they
publicize the issue, they decrease the desirability and property values of the community.

Government officials face similar dilemmas: They must warn, but not cause undue
panic or market fight. They must respond to public demands, but not exceed a variety of
limiting criteria, such as scientific and legal standards of proof decision-making
authority, budgetary constraints, and politicaleconomic realities. Citizens
understandably tend to see all such criteria as more protective of business and
government interests than their own.

Edelstein called the process of community empowerment in the face of toxic threat "the
enabling response." It encompasses many of the same issues that community
development does in other contexts, such as the need to find and develop community
leadership and to prevent burnout among leaders. Environmental empowerment also has
the same benefits as other forms of community development, including improved social
support and cohesion, information gathering and dissemination, and most important of
all, power in numbers.

National environmental politics have only contributed to the sense of outrage among
some and the disempowerment of many. For example, the widespread and long-used
practice of placing toxic waste disposal and other hazardous industrial sites in or near
poor and minority communities because they are presumed to be environmentally
disenfranchised (i.e., more concerned with jobs than with their own health or
environment) has led to charges of environmental racism (Bryant & Mohai, 1992).

As seemingly ineffectual Environmental Protection Agency and court action under

Superfund drags on with contaminated sites being identified faster than old sites are
cleaned up, residents in almost every county of every state are facing the dialectics of
environmental empowerment/disempowerment. According to Edelstein, they must (a)
take the initiative and not let the bureaucracy control the decision-making process; (b)
try to channel anxiety over the environmental threat into a constructive sense of
community, shared anger, energy, and mobilization rather than isolationist fear and
helplessness; (c) look for existing or innovative ways of rallying people; and (d) avoid
the typical "not-in-my-backyard" reaction and answer, "not in anyone's backyard."
Community Crime Prevention

There are two general approaches to community crime prevention (Curtis, 1987;
Podolefsky, 1983; Rosenbaum, 1988). One is the victimization prevention approach,
which includes (a) individual protective measures collectively encouraged (e.g.,
Operation I.D.), (b) block, building, or neighborhood surveillance (e.g., block or
neighborhood watch), and (c) efforts to improve crime deterrence by making the
criminal justice system more effective (e.g., lobbying police for more patrols). The
other is the social problems or empowerment approach, which aims to eliminate the root
causes of crime and includes (a) community development organizing for improving the
neighborhood physical, social, and economic environment and (b) positive youth
programs typically focusing on recreation or employment and building self-esteem as
well as skills.

Some programs overlap approaches. In Salt Lake City, the Gang Task Force (a local law
enforcement coalition) conducts Grassroots Empowerment Training workshops in the
community. These are aimed not at empowering gang members or potential gang
members, but at helping adult residents (in practice, mainly homeowners) take back
their streets and presumably regain control over problems of graffiti and gang violence.

Theoretically, both the empowerment and victimization prevention approaches to

community crime prevention should empower participants. Criminal victimization has a
tendency to disempower both individuals and communities as fear and worry about the
future of the neighborhood increase anxiety, depression, and community disintegration
(Taylor & Perkins, 1995). The social problems approach appears to be the more
empowering of the two, however. This is not necessarily because it is any more
effective at reducing crime; both approaches have achieved only mixed success
according to evaluation studies (Rosenbaum, 1988). Rather, it may be due to
empowerment groups tending to involve more people actively and on a more regular
and long-term basis on issues other than crime, and the fact that such groups do not
raise community fears, as victimization prevention programs often do. But an important
caveat is that crime, and concern about crime, have not been found to be catalysts for
citizen participation in community empowerment organizations, even those with a
major focus on crime prevention (Perkins et al, 1990).

Self/Mutual Help Groups

Perhaps the most common form of empowerment-focused social intervention, with

millions of participants in the United States alone, is the selfor mutual-help movement.
Self-help groups aim to improve the psychological and physical functioning of
individuals sharing some specific life experience or problem. Although many self-help
groups are avowedly apolitical and eschew social action, the movement as a whole has
moved over time toward models of advocacy and empowerment (Riessman & Bay,
1992). As with other empowerment-based social interventions, both support and
criticism of selfhelp cut across political lines. A dialectical approach may be needed to
understand the self-help movement's simultaneous strains of populism and
progressivism (Reissman & Bay, 1992).

The empowering experience of self-help is perhaps most salient at the individual and
group levels (Kahn & Bender, 1985; Levy, 1976; Luke, Rappaport, & Seidman, 1991;
Maton, 1988; Maton & Salem, 1995; Rappaport, Reischl, & Zimmerman, 1991). But
the impact of the groups is also felt at organizational (Zimmerman et al., 1991) and
institutional (Zola, 1987) levels. This is especially true of groups that move beyond the
support-only function to include advocacy work (e.g., Gay Men's Health Crisis; see also
Balcazar, Seekins, Fawcett, & Hopkins, 1990; Yeich & Levine, 1994).

The idea of empowerment has become popular in self-help because the sources of help
are group members' own efforts, knowledge, and emotional support as peers. Similarly,
the origin of and control over such groups typically rest with the members themselves,
not with professionals or any external agency or authority (Levy, 1976). For most such
groups, their primary purpose is to empower their membership in taking control over
their lives and the institutions that affect them. Paradoxically, some of the most
successful self-help groups (including 12-step programs) convince their members that
the first step toward empowerment lies in relinquishing the desire for individual control
and accepting the influence of a "higher power" (or at least group norms). This same
dialectic between personal and spiritual control is found with empowerment in religious
settings (Maton & Rappaport, 1984). With the possible exception of Alcoholics
Anonymous, self-help groups tend to attract more women than men. Indeed, the
women's consciousness-raising group is one of the best examples of self-help as part of
an empowering social and political movement (Riger, 1984).

Consciousness Raising

Similar to political empowerment, consciousness raising involves the shift in one's

world view that results from recognizing one's inferior social and economic position in
society (Levine & Perkins, 1987). A better understanding of gender and other
differences in the experience of and reaction to power disparities (Bookman & Morgan,
1988) is just one of the many ways self-help and conscious raising can inform our
understanding of empowerment and vice versa. Riger (1993) made the important point
that an empowerment orientation may only serve to increase competition within or
among groups and thus overshadow more cooperative or communitarian approaches
that women's or other groups might take. This criticism ignores the fact that groups
must also be empowered at both the individual and organizational level in order to deal
with group-level power and resource disparities, however (Serrano-Garcia, 1994).
Whether or not the danger of empowered people competing with each other is
significant, Riger's caution does highlight the importance of collaboration within
organizations (Bond & Keys, 1993) and effective coalition building among them (cf.
Fawcett et al., 1995; McMillan, Florin, Stevenson, Kerman, & Mitchell, 1995;
O'Sullivan, Waugh & Espeland, 1984).

Competence-Building Primary Prevention Programs

Prevention and empowerment have tended to be categorized as separate action

paradigms. But preventive interventions that adopt a strengths approach, such as youth
mentoring programs (Freedman, 1993), may increase the social and political skills, self-
efficacy, and confidence of both program recipients and workers. Such competence-
building programs may be considered exemplars of empowerment and provide
conceptual bridges between the two paradigms. Two other popular examples are Project
Head Start and interpersonal problem-solving training.
Head Start

Education has long been used for the purpose of promoting equal opportunity and
empowerment, especially to compensate for poverty, disability, and other disadvantages.
The dual rationale for this is that (a) early experiences, particularly in school, are
thought to play an important role in social adjustment and social mobility later in life
and (b) schools allow the most practical access to the greatest number of children. By
far the largest and most popular and enduring compensatory education program has
been Project Head Start, the broad national program to prepare poor preschoolers for the
demands of first grade and beyond (Zigler & Muenchow, 1992).

Sarason (1978) argued that Head Start and other War-On-Poverty programs had
maintained empowerment on the national agenda only, inadvertently, through their
failure to eradicate poverty and their maintenance of the status quo. But from the
beginning, a major goal of Head Start was to directly empower poor communities,
parents, and children through their "maximum feasible participation" in the program
(Zigler & Muenchow, 1992). Local centers were given control over the planning and
operation of specific program goals, techniques, and duration. Parental participation and
local control enable communities to develop culturally sensitive and unique preschool
programs (Roberts, 1993).

Problem Solving

School-based social or interpersonal problem-solving (IPS) training is one example of a

competence-building curriculum that has shown promise as a strategy to teach children
the social-cognitive skills necessary for a sense of mastery or control in problem
situations and life, generally. IPS skills include viewing problems from the other
person's perspective, comprehending the etiology of the problem, generating alternative
solutions to problems, and foreseeing the possible consequences of those solutions. It is
clear that IPS training can make children appear empowered insofar as responding more
effectively and prosocially to hypothetical and simulated interpersonal problem
situations. Evaluations of IPS intervention programs have produced mixed results,
however. As with Head Start, variation in IPS program implementation makes it
difficult to draw any definitive conclusions about its effectiveness (Elias et al., 1986).
Furthermore, many IPS studies have not sufficiently considered possible cultural and
sex differences in problem solving. Exploration of different coping styles may
illuminate ways to teach the most empowering skills to all.

Organizational Management Reforms

At the organizational level, enhancing people's control could be achieved by any

number of strategies that shift power from executives, bureaucratic administrators,
professionals, and experts to middle-managers, workers, and collective (often
client/community-based) governing boards. Empowerment of managers is the subject of
Spretizer (1995) and governing boards are covered in previous issues of this journal
(Bond & Keys, 1993; Gruber & Trickett, 1987). I therefore briefly review two forms of
worker empowerment: organization development (OD) and participatory workplace
democracy.

Organization Development
OD is a change strategy that has been used in a wide variety of public and private-sector
organizations to create "a culture which institutionalizes the use of social technologies
to facilitate diagnosis and change of interpersonal, group, and intergroup behavior,
especially those behaviors related to organizational decision-making, planning and
communication" (Friedlander & Brown, 1974, p. 343). It is a "strategy for facilitating
change and development in people (e.g., styles, values, skills), in technology (e.g.,
greater simplicity, complexity), and in organizational processes and structures (e.g.,
relationships, roles)" (pp. 314-316). It emphasizes workers' morale, satisfaction,
participatory collaboration, and work climate. OD theories have been applied to help
give workers a sense of mission and job ownership, respect for oneself and one's
coworkers, new knowledge, improved lines of communication, and group support for
solving problems.

All of this sounds relevant to empowering workers, but OD interventions have not
generally developed empowerment as a major focus of change at the organization,
group, or individual level. Out of 1,582 articles on OD in four different business or
social science CD-ROMs, only 21 mentioned empowerment in the title or abstract.

Participatory Workplace Democracy

This is a truer exemplar of empowerment at both the individual and organization levels.
Many problems in the workplace, for workers, supervisors, and clients, stem from the
fact that the dominant organizational structure is still based on 19th-century
bureaucratic industrial management principles that are antithetical to empowerment
(Toch & Grant, 1982). They are now being questioned more frequently in business
(Spreitzer, 1995) and are clearly out of place with the culture and goals of most human
service programs.

Strategies for worker empowerment include decreasing layers of supervision, pushing

decision making lower in the hierarchy, moving from assembly line organizational
process to team work process (e.g., Quality Circles), and rejuvenating the grass roots of
labor unions. Job enrichment (Emery & Emery, 1976) focuses on various criteria that
may be viewed as psychological job requirements, including physical space,
psychological space (i.e., nonoppressive supervision and work climate), and its
antithesis - meaningful feedback (i.e., it is possible to get too little supervision),
opportunities to learn on the job and to be challenged, variety, conditions allowing help
and respect from fellow workers, a sense that one's own work is meaningful and uses
the abilities that the worker has to offer, a desirable future with new possibilities (i.e.,
dead-end jobs are disempowering), and especially, a sense of control over goal setting
and over the paths to reach those goals.

Empowerment theories in management are thus rife. But (as in other fields), according
to Conger and Kanungo (1988), they lack clarity and consistency in the definition and
use of the concept of empowerment and lack integration between theory and practice.

Institutional Reforms

Health Care
It appears that much of health care reform may be determined in the current national
policy debate and so could be discussed equally well in the next section. The very first
health reform bill introduced in the 103rd Congress was the Universal Health Benefits
Empowerment and Partnership Act of 1993. As that and other attempts at serious
reform failed, Rep. Jim Cooper repeatedly claimed that his managed competition
national health care proposal would empower the average citizen consumer.

Yet, with its unwieldy and hierarchical bureaucracy, dominated by the interests of the
medical profession and insurance and pharmaceutical industries, it is difficult to
imagine an institution that is more disempowering than the health care system. It seems
reasonable to assume that meaningful empowerment of health care consumers and
workers is more likely to occur at the local community and organizational level.
Prevention of HIV or other health problems may be the central focus of programs that
have a broader, empowering effect on the target population (Levine et al., 1993).
Community empowerment partnership coalitions have become a leading model for
public health promotion and substance abuse prevention (Altman et al., 1991; Fawcett
et al., 1995; Kumpfer, Turner, & Alvarado, 1991; Linney & Wandersman, 1991;
McMillan, et al., 1995; Wolff, 1987). All provide excellent examples of making their
community empowerment models both clear and practical, with well-defined and tested
strategies and specific tactics.

Education

Similar trends have been evident for some time in educational training and policy.
Empowerment was central to Freire's (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed in Latin
American and it has become a guiding principle in teacher training in this country
(Vaines, 1993; Williams, 1988). For example, the stated mission of the American
Association of Family and Consumer Sciences (formerly, American Home Economics
Association) is "Empowering Individuals, Strengthening Families, Enabling
Communities." School systems have decentralized to give more power over curricular
and other decisions to local school boards, who have passed much of it on to principals,
teachers, and parents. Sweeping the country are a variety of new, empowerment-focused
parent involvement programs that go well beyond PTA activities, which have also
expanded greatly in many districts.

Institutional reforms have occurred frequently with much fanfare throughout the history
of public education, much of it targeted at minority students. Cummins (1986) claimed
that previous attempts at minority educational reform, such as compensatory education
and bilingual education, were severely limited because they did not significantly change
the relationships between educators and minority students and between schools and
minority communities. He advocated a redefinition of educational roles within the
classroom, community, and broader society that would promote the empowerment of
students. Gruber and Trickett (1987) found that attempts to empower parents and
students in an inner-city alternative school failed for similar reasons. They argue that
the concept of empowering others is paradoxical in that in virtually all settings, not just
educational ones, the institutional context serves to maintain existing inequalities. It
may be necessary to reframe such paradoxes into dialectical terms, such as the need for
authoritative (i.e., the opposite of empowering) leadership to force fundamental
institutional changes (Bond & Keys, 1993; Cummins, 1986), if the current set of
empowerment reforms are to have a greater or more lasting impact than previous ones.
National and Foreign Policies

Many of the empowerment programs (e.g., Head Start, community crime prevention)
and institutional reforms (e.g., health care, education) I have discussed have been
debated and enacted at the state and federal (i.e., societal) levels. In most cases their
planning and implementation occurred in the local community, program, or coalition.
But it is at the federal policy level, where empowerment has been invoked to sell
legislation promoting everything from televisions that would allow parents to tune out
violence to the right to sell assault rifles, that the term has probably been most overused.
Here are three examples in which the term, although still not well defined, seems more
appropriately used.

Community Service

In proposing his national community service bill,3 President Clinton said he wanted "to
empower young people and their communities and not bureaucracies." By paying more
than lip service to local community organization control and by providing the individual
participant with an intensive experience in public service, this is one national
empowerment-focused policy whose potential, at least for the workers if not for the
clients, actually comes close to matching the rhetoric. The Americorps program, a kind
of domestic Peace Corps, is ostensibly based on a principle of mutually empowering
relationships between alienated, middle-class young people and those predominantly
poor people they serve. Some programs are aimed at getting inner-city youth involved
in community service (e.g., Conservation Corps). Workers are paid minimum wage and
money toward college expenses in exchange for 2 years of community service working
with undeserved (especially youth and elderly) populations in many of the policy areas
already discussed: health care, education (Teach for America), environmental protection,
housing, crime prevention (Police Corps).

Community service has been on the local, state, and federal agendas for several years,
but it is perhaps no coincidence that it began taking off even prior to the Clinton
administration as the other kind of national service (defense and defense-related) jobs
have declined. The program started with ambitious plans to expand to 100,000 service
workers (compared to about 18,000 workers in the Peace Corps, Vista, and more than
60 state and local programs combined). The program has been targeted for elimination
by Republican leaders in the current Congress, however (see Conservative Uses . . .,
below).

As with other federal programs with significant de facto local control (e.g., Head Start),
implementation is critical. A special issue of Social Policy (Fall, 1993) devoted to
National Service includes various recommendations to make the program empowering
for both volunteers and the communities served. Mainly, local and national
administrators should look to what has worked well in the rich history of private-sector
community service. Similar to mentoring programs, one effective approach is
multigenerational: to involve retirees and other adult trainers and role models as the
leadership skills and awareness of youth are developed at different ages and ability
levels. Most important of all, service programs and participants must be accountable to
the host community and the experience should be continually reassessed with the goal
of reciprocal benefits (for both providers and recipients).
Welfare Reform

Federal policy makers also use the term, if not the research, of empowerment to push
self-sufficiency-oriented welfare reform. President Clinton, in his first State of the
Union Address, proclaimed that he wanted to "shift people from entitlement programs
to empowerment programs." And so his welfare reform bill was entitled the
Responsibility and Empowerment Support Program providing Employment, Childcare,
and Training (RESPECT) Act. Its purpose was "to provide welfare families with the
education, training, job search, and work experience needed to prepare them to leave
welfare within two years." Like most of the other ostensible empowerment policies at
the societal level, however, there is nothing in this legislation that is socially or
politically empowering (i.e., in terms of the community, issue, or labor consciousness
and organizing skills they will need once off welfare). Current welfare reform proposals,
which focus on individual responsibility, tend to blame the victim and ignore contextual
social and economic problems, including the availability of family-wage jobs and
affordable child care. The Administration might do better to nationally replicate the
Center for Employment and Training, which grew out of the California migrant farm
workers movement and which comes closer to actually empowering its participants as
they move at their own pace through intensive training of life skills and specific,
market-based job skills.

Empowerment Zones

The Clinton community development policy is called the Empowerment Zone Initiative.
The legislation states: "public-private partnerships between government and
community-based organizations offer an opportunity to empower residents of low-
income distressed communities and to forge innovative solutions to the challenges
confronting these communities." It is similar to the urban enterprise zone concept of
targeted capital investment, training, and employment tax incentives, but expanded to
some rural areas and Indian reservations as well as 110 urban communities. The White
House claims that its "bottom-up, community-based strategy" will reduce bureaucratic
red tape at the local level in order to encourage the involvement of existing small
community development organizations. Although social service block grants are
included, the main innovation is the proposed creation of 100 community development
investment banks around the country to promote the infusion of money into the zones.
Apparently, money is not only power but also empowerment. Despite the name, there
seems to be little in this legislation that is empowering or new.

International Empowerment

The language of foreign policy and diplomacy is notoriously cryptic, filled with
understatement and latent meanings. This can make international empowerment policies
particularly paradoxical. It is at this level that the term empowerment should take on
more of the original, clearer, legal meaning. But if empowerment policies tend toward
greater ambiguity, and possibly ineffectiveness, at higher levels of analysis,
international empowerment policies may be particularly suspect.

One such policy is the Early Empowerment agreement reached between Israel and the
Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Cairo in August 1994. Israel rejected full
Palestinian autonomy, including elections, throughout the West Bank in favor of Early
Empowerment, which provided for limited Palestinian autonomy in certain,
circumscribed functional areas: education and culture, health, social welfare, direct
taxation, and tourism (Gold, 1994). The PLOs own policies were no more empowering.
As of July 1995, the PLO had still not even held elections in Gaza where they were
allowed. At this level, "empowerment" apparently does not necessarily mean democracy.

Conservative Uses and Abuses of Empowerment

Berger and Neuhaus (1977) were among the first to use the term empowerment in the
community (as opposed to 6 gal or individual) context. But perhaps the more significant
impact of their American Enterprise Institute monograph was to provide a populist-
sounding language and rationale to fiscal conservatives fighting antipoverty programs,
in particular, and government domestic spending and regulation, in general. Berger and
Neuhaus focused on the importance of mediating structures (what Vaclav Havel, and
Friedmann, 1992, call "civil society"), such as neighborhood, family, church, voluntary
associations, and cultural identification in making more efficient public policy. And
justifiably so.

But to Berger and Neuhaus, empowerment is just a means. As ends, they seem more
concerned with lowering taxes and finding "alternative mechanisms . . . to provide
welfare-state services" (p. 1, their emphasis) than with reducing poverty, improving the
quality of community life, or creating political bases of the newly empowered. The
reactionary potential of their conception of empowerment is evident in their warning
against civil liberties as the enemy of communal values, in their isolation of racism as
the only form of discrimination worthy of legal proscription and their approval of
community control over legal but "deviant" behavior (pp. 12-13).

Berger and Neuhaus presaged the neoconservative movement's cooptation of the term
empowerment. But whereas Berger and Neuhaus focused on the importance of
community and improving government services, neoconservatives use the term as a
cloak for a combination of antigovernment individualism and corporate imperialism.
Not wanting to miss the empowerment bandwagon, right-wing leaders of the
Republican Party recently started Empower America, a political organization funded by
profits from leveraged stock buy-outs. Just who Empower American wants to empower
is open to speculation. Its mission and policy statements are predictably vague, but do
champion entrepreneurship, lower taxes, less government spending and regulation, and
international free-market capitalism.

Thus, it is unlikely that Empower America's operational definition of empowerment, if

it has one, let alone its preferred methods to achieve empowerment, would exactly
match that of either progressives or the research literature. It is therefore in the
macropolitical realm that empowerment is used most loosely and ambiguously, making
it all the more powerful as ideological rhetoric. Politicians of every persuasion have
adopted the term because it is popular, and are using it to mean whatever they want.
This is not an auspicious circumstance for those who wish to apply empowerment
theory and research with the goal of making social policy more effective.

IMPROVING THE USE OF EMPOWERMENT THEORY AND RESEARCH

The preceding overview finds that empowerment is more vaguely and confusingly
applied at the policy than the community, program organizational, or institutional levels.
But the need is acute for empowerment researchers to "speak truth to power" by sharing
their knowledge with community leaders, clients, staff, and administrators in all kinds
of organizations, and policy makers at all levels of government. Unlike most areas of
research application, this is by definition one in which legions of the empowered can be
expected to join forces with researchers to work for political change. I briefly examine
some of the issues researchers, administrators, and policy makers face in improving the
organization-to-policy-level application of empowerment or any research.

Social Science and Community Organizations

Much has been written about how to make research more useful to community
organizations (Linney & Wandersman, 1991; Serrano-Garcia, 1984; Tolan, Keys,
Chertok, & Jason, 1990). Based on a community empowerment intervention with grass-
roots community leaders, Chavis, Stucky, and Wandersman (1983) argued to all
psychologists that research would be more useful if it were more of a collaborative
process with the community and its citizens. Borrowing from their analysis,
empowerment research would be less mystifying to community leaders and
organization members if they were more involved in setting priorities, in monitoring
program implementation, in the design and evaluation of the data feedback process
(workshops, materials, etc.), and in the interpretation of the data. They could be taught
basic, practical need assessment and evaluation research methods. That would make it
more likely that the data and the feedback would not be ends in themselves but means
toward meeting the needs of the organization or community and its members. Such a
partnership among empowerment researchers, citizen/clients, and
practitioner/administrators can improve the quality of the research, enhance its use,
encourage greater public support for empowerment research, and ultimately improve
empowerment applications in the community.

Chavis et al. (1983) concluded that this approach is unfamiliar to most social scientists
and may require a different value orientation, new resources, skills and roles, a loss of
control over the research, political issues, and academic costs (unless new rewards are
created to offset those costs). Perkins and Wandersman (1990) used research conducted
with an empowerment-oriented nonprofit organization and block associations to expand
on those benefits and pitfalls in doing research with community organizations. The
benefits included material and human resources, legitimacy and entree (with both
funding sources and the communities), and more practical knowledge about specific
communities, organizations, and leaders. The collaborative relationship did more than
increase the relevance, validity, and application of the research it made it possible.

The pitfalls of doing empowerment or any research with community organizations

include both nonindependence bias, or being too closely tied to the organization, and
problems of being too independent of the organization (Perkins & Wandersman, 1990).
The latter include bureaucratic problems, failing to spend enough time with the people,
communities, or organizations that one is trying to understand and empower, and the
various constraints that divergent perspectives and priorities can place on sampling
strategy, what research questions get asked, and how they are asked. Other pitfalls are
failing to measure program activity and implementation, ignoring spillover
(contamination) and naturalistic effects - not only on program staff and clients but on
their physical environment and social climate, and underestimating the practitioner.
Perkins and Wandersman concluded that the community and organization must reveal
and define both the official goals of the program and any hidden agendas and negotiate
with the researcher the clearest and most specific procedure possible for determining
whose information and experience will be used as a basis for action under what
circumstances. For their part, empowerment researchers working with community
organizations should use multiple methods to collect qualitative and process as well as
outcome data and validate and give credit to the efforts and feelings of practitioners and
clients as much as possible.

Social Science and Executive and Legislative Policy Making

Given the above review of ostensible empowerment policies, our knowledge about real
empowerment processes is most needed to inform higher levels of policy making. But
social researchers have always had difficulty applying their data to issues of public
policy and communicating the data clearly and effectively to the administrative and
legislative branches of government (regarding judicial applications, see Perkins, 1988).
This is evidently the case even for empowerment researchers, who one might expect to
be more politically savvy.

Weiss (1977) found that most of the perceived dangers, costs, and risks involved in
using social science as part of government policy making (e.g., that government
sponsorship diverts and distorts the true scientific enterprise, forces hasty conclusions,
imposes value judgments onto otherwise value-free research) are as simplistic as the
more favorable assumptions (e.g., that greater use of social knowledge can only
improve government decisions and that only minor reforms are needed to help
government officials make better use of research). She offers four more complex
conclusions. First, the logic and rationality of social scientists' world view is not how
government always operates and not what politicians usually want to hear. Second,
researchers too often assume that they know best and that policy makers will accept that
fact regardless of the political interests at stake. Third, research is used by policy makers
usually in a pragmatic and expedient way (as ammunition to back up a decision already
made or as a general guide to, or validation of, an overall policy direction), rather than
to specifically form particular decisions. Fourth, there are different models of research
use (e.g., decision-driven, knowledge-driven, interactive, research as political
ammunition, and research as conceptualization).

Similarly, Knorr (1977) has identified four different roles for social science in the
decision-making process: (a) decision-preparatory (usually the official role, in which
data serve as an information base prior to a decision), (b) decision-constitutive (direct
application of data to a particularly policy or program, which in reality is rare), (c)
substitution in which research is used to satisfy concern while delaying any real action,
(d) legitimating (selective and often distorted use of data to rationalize a decision
already made on the grounds of politics or personal opinion).

Thus, policy making is far from a rational process. It follows more of a chaotic dynamic
interest group model (Seekins, Maynard-Moody, & Fawcett, 1987) in which researchers
interested in informing the process must become more familiar with its complexity and
key players and must become more proactive not only in the beginning (planning) and
end (evaluation) stages, but throughout.
Focusing on the early stages, Rein and Schon (1977) argued that there is usually a lack
of consensus about what the exact definition of the problem is and, since politicians use
research primarily to legitimate policy stances, research influences the climate of
opinion more than it does specific decisions. They concluded that "policy development
is about problem setting, dilemma and tradeoff management, and consensus building via
coalition formation" (p. 236) and so policy research should refocus more systematically
on problem setting (rather than problem solving). They recommend the use of
generative metaphors to gain and convey essential insights, draw lessons, and turn the
social policy problem into a personal story.

An empowerment agenda would seem to fit well into this more qualitative or anecdotal
approach. This may make the presentation of the problem more compelling, but the
danger is that stories tend to focus our attention too much on individuals rather than
institutional and structural problems, which are the bigger sources of problems and what
government is supposed to solve. Rein and Schon (1977) also recommended applying
various problem-solving strategies: for example, aggregating and disaggregating related
issues (i.e., how do they differ and what do they have in common?) and working back
from action (i.e., starting with the kinds of solutions that are more attainable).

Finally, Rein and Schon argue that problem setting should be evaluated according to
five main criteria: (a) Is it consistent (does it fit with a large number of facts in a
consistent and plausible framework?). (b) Is it testable? (through either basic research or
program evaluation). (c) Does it lead to a morally acceptable position? (d) Does it lead
to a clear prescription for action? (e) Is it aesthetically appealing? (i.e., a simple and
elegant understanding of the problem).

Seekins and Fawcett (1986) identified various types of research information that is
particularly useful in the early stages of policy development. In the first stage of agenda
formation, data on the dimensions and relative standing of the issue, the number of
people affected, and the interests of those involved would be helpful. The next stage,
policy adoption, demands information on what variables are likely to control the
behavior of those affected by the policy, specific program alternatives, and the social
acceptability of those alternatives.

Caplan (1977) analyzed 575 cases of social research utilization in interviews with 204
different federal government officials in the executive branch. He identified five
important preconditions for social research being used by policy makers: First, the
policy maker must share an appreciation of the scientific as well as extrascientific (i.e.,
political, ideological, administrative, economic) aspects of the policy issue. Second, a
conscious sense of social direction and responsibility must be a central value for the
policy maker. Third, the policy issue must be well defined and require research
knowledge to solve.4 Fourth, the research findings must be methodologically sound and
believable, have politically feasible implications, and not be counterintuitive. (Policy
makers appear to have an even harder time accepting unexpected findings than do the
researchers whose hypotheses are not supported by the data.) Fifth, policy makes and
researchers must be linked by a staff capable of translating data into policy goals and
objectives. Caplan found that government officials perceive that policy makers and
researchers represent two distinct and mutually distrusting cultures that have to be
bridged before they can work together effectively. For example, most policy makers
believe that social scientists are naive about the political feasibility of applying their
findings and need to become more familiar with the policy-making process.

Caplan's (1977) conclusion has gone largely unheeded: that new groups of scientists and
policy makers need to be formed to

"make realistic and rational appraisals of . . . information . . .; make appropriate

(translations) of information from the universities to the policy setting . . .; recast policy
issues into researchable terms; . . .distinguish between scientific and extrascientific
knowledge needs; deal with the value issues and bureaucratic factors that influence the
production and use of scientific knowledge; and gain the trust of policy makers and . . .
knowledge of the policy-making process to substantially introduce social science
knowledge in usable form into the policy-making process at the key points where it will
most likely be used. (p. 196)"

S. Berger (1980) argued "that success or failure in the application of social science
depends on a mesh between the scientific skills and political interests of the social
scientists on the one side, and the political skills and scientific interests of the policy
makers on the other" (p. 8). With the apparent political interest among many
empowerment researchers, they would seem to fulfill half of that equation. Berger
agrees with Caplan that where science and politics have successfully converged, it has
been due to scientists and politicians working together on both activities around a
specific project. The six factors she identified that determine the contribution of social
science to policy are similar to those discussed above for community organizations: (a)
how the question (or problem) has been posed (usually by politicians, which can make
research difficult); (b) the structure of academic disciplines and their system of
incentives (this has resulted in the emphasis on publishing in specialized,
intradisciplinary, "pure" research journals rather than on interdisciplinary or ecological
or applied research or on teaching and other, more immediate forms of dissemination);
(c) field experience; (d) familiarity with and sensitivity to cultural differences; (e) the
choice of methodologies and technologies (most researchers are trained in just one
methodology and might develop their own technology of some kind; and so they
become biased in favor of those; but choosing the appropriate methodologies and
technologies should come last, not first); (f) the political values of the researcher.

Berger (1980) also found that social science is most likely to be used when the problem
is seen as a crisis by the public and by politicians, which seems almost paradoxical
given the deliberative, complex, and probabilistic nature of social research. It does not
lend itself to the quick, decisive, and universal fixes that crises demand, which is why
scientists and policy makers operate on different time frames. But even when social
science information is hedged with qualifications and uncertainties, it is more objective
and reliable than the biased views, hunches and experiences of politicians, judges, the
media, and other opinion makers.

Of Rein's three strategies for policy research (as cited by Berger, 1980) - consensual (in
which policy makers and administrators get the knowledge they want), contentious
(research that concentrates on the failings of government policy and is therefore ignored
or used, depending on the policy maker's agenda), and paradigm-challenging ("the
researcher acts independently of the established paradigm and tries to expose its
fundamental weaknesses and to propose alternate principles of intervention," S. Berger,
1980, p. 23) - Berger argued that only the third approach, one adopted by many
empowerment groups and researchers, poses a serious dilemma for the policy maker.
New and innovative principles of intervention promise the highest payoff but they
cannot be specified in advance since they require giving maximum control to the
researcher. With empowerment interventions, workers and clients are in control, which
can also make evaluation difficult. But it is during crises, when research is relied on the
most, that paradigm-challenging interventions and research, like those based on
empowerment concepts (and not just ideological rhetoric), are most called for.

CONCLUSIONS

Despite the vast proliferation of programs and policies claiming to be based on the
concept of empowerment, the connections between policy or program content and
empowerment theory and research are often tenuous at best, especially at the legislative
and administrative policy level. I offer 10 recommendations to policy makers, program
planners, and especially empowerment researchers:

1. Greater attention should be paid to different levels of empowerment (individual,

organization, community). Psychologists, in particular, must look beyond individualistic
conceptions, most of which are adequately captured by the existing terms and
knowledge base, to collective conceptions of empowerment that are commensurate with
solving group, organizational, and community problems (Perkins et al., 1990).

2. Smaller is better. Beyond the community and organizational level, efforts to empower
through higher levels of policy-making appear to result in progressively more
ambiguous conceptions of empowerment and diminishing returns. As the experience of
community development and other policy areas suggest, local grass-roots efforts may
work best.

3. The paradox implied in the first two recommendations illustrates the validity and
utility of a dialectical analysis of empowerment (Rappaport, 1981). Possible dialectics
include (a) simultaneously emphasizing both personal and collective (and, for some,
spiritual) control, (b) the paradoxical requirements of leadership, order, and
organization in helping others to help themselves (i.e., to counteract disempowering
institutional constraints; Gruber & Trickett, 1987), (c) people's needs for both individual
and community identity within empowering organizations and (d) for both change and
stability at all levels (Brown & Perkins, 1992), (e) the personal and organizational
benefits of greater empowerment along with its risks and challenges (e.g., burnout,
disappointment), (f) a political orientation embraceable by Big Government
progressives and Small Government conservatives alike (Riessman & Bay, 1992), and
(g) an approach to theory and research on empowerment that allows for both deductive
and inductive logic and both idiographic and nomothetic information. We should not
blind ourselves to possible universal principles, but we also need to pay more specific
attention to what models of empowerment work with what populations in what settings
and why.

4. The relationship between empowerment cognitions, person-environment transactions

(Altman & Rogoff, 1987), and behaviors must continue to be explored more thoroughly
(Perkins et al., 1990; Zimmerman, 1989; 1990). In particular, because many vague
descriptions of empowering thought patterns, emotions, and other intrapsychic
constructions (especially in the nonscientific literature) have clouded the definition of
the concept, greater emphasis on empowering behaviors - such as citizen participation
in the community, workplace, and government - is needed for the sake of clarity and
validation of the construct.

5. Empowerment researchers need to become more familiar with the policy-making

process, its complexity and key players, and more comfortable disseminating and
directly applying their research, not just in a particular organization, but by working
with executive, legislative, and judicial policy-making bodies and advocacy
organizations at all levels, from block and neighborhood associations to federal and
international agencies.

6. Empowerment-related research itself would be better used if, instead of conducting

the research prior to considering its exact policy application, more empowerment
researchers were to follow Coleman's (1972) five steps toward planning effective policy
research: "1) identify the parties in policy outcomes and with some power or potential
power to affect policy; 2) determine interests of these parties; 3) find what kinds of
information are relevant to their interests; 4) determine the best way to obtain this
information; 5) determine how to report the results" (p. 16).

7. The effective policy researchers' job does not end there. They must become more
proactive, not only in the planning and evaluation stages but throughout the process,
from agenda formation and policy adoption to policy implementation and review
(Seekins & Fawcett, 1986).

8. As evidenced by the studies described in this issue, applied researchers, especially

those working with expert-wary and unsubmissive empowerment organizations, should
play the role more of learner/collaborator than scientist (Chavis et al., 1983; Kroeker,
1993; Perkins & Wandersman, 1990; Yeich & Levine, 1994). This implies that graduate
programs must do a better job of training for such a role.

9. Empowerment researchers must learn to disseminate more practical information and

to deliver it in ways with which they may have little experience. This means cultivating
information channels within the policy-making bureaucracy. It may include choosing
multiple target audiences (e.g., legislators, voters, demographic and other interest
groups), understanding each one's unique orientation, and tailoring the focus and style
of presentation accordingly. It requires the ability to present complicated theories and
data concisely, in plain but accurate terms (i.e., without overgeneralizing or overstating
the case). Berkowitz's (1990) charge that we do not know enough about measuring or
maintaining empowerment is still all too valid.

10. Both theory and research would be more practical if more researchers carefully
examined and tried to understand the qualitative knowledge about real-world
empowerment processes that practitioners bring. For example, grass-roots community
organizing principles (e.g., of leadership and organization structure, climate, processes,
development, and momentum) may apply equally well to more institutionalized
applications of empowerment. The clearest definitions and descriptions of
empowerment may come more from voices on the front lines of movements for social
change than from the policy or even research literatures. We could use fewer Humpty
Dumpty policy makers and King of Hearts psychologists.
[Footnote]
KEY WORDS: empowerment; public policy; social intervention; research application;
dialectical.

[Footnote]
1Portions of this paper were first presented in the program "Empowerment Theory,
Research and policy" at the Biennial Conference on Community Research and Action,
Williamsburg, Virginia, June 18, 1993. The author thanks Barbara B. Brown, Jo Ann
Lippe, Ken Maton and his students, David V. Perkins, Marc A. Zimmerman, and the
anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts.
2All correspondence should be sent to Douglas D. Perkins, Environment and Behavior
Area, FCS Department/AEB, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112.

[Footnote]
3This is not be confused with the National Community Services Empowerment
Partnership (NCSEP) bill, which set up an NCSEP Corporation and Advisory
Committee to "empower" (which, in policy speak, means many things; in this case, fund
and assist) community development and community service organizations (see
"Empowerment Zones").

[Footnote]
4Caplan believes that two of the worst examples of this are social indicators research
and program evaluation which is ironic given that they are probably the most common
kinds of government-sponsored social research. He thinks that the problem lies in the
lack of mutual understanding about such research - what the key variables really mean
and how they should be translated into policy.

[Reference] » View reference page with links

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