Empowerment Is A Choice

"The desire for the power to control the conditions in one's life is a basic need possessed by virtually everyone. Power is sometimes associated with the desire for personal safety. It is also referred to as closely associated with free will, the ability to choose, and the degree to which a person can influence others. In individualistic societies, personal power is a primary value of the culture and is considered more important than the priorities of the group. This book is about "power with" rather than "power over" others - but also addresses power within oneself. We have written with the intent to help leaders to more effectively empower others within their organizations - but we have focused as well on the critical importance of self-empowerment and the ability of individuals to take control of their own lives to become the best persons that they can be. It is painfully evident that today's leaders have failed badly at empowering their employees - resulting in relationships that are frequently strained and generating employee commitment that is often "marginal" at best. Worldwide, empowerment and employee engagement are both low and employees have lost trust for leaders in organizations of all types. The inability of organizations to engender employee commitment and extra-mile performance detracts from the ability of companies to compete in today's global environment - but "old style" command and control management policies nonetheless prevail in many companies - to the detriment of the companies, their customers and employees, and to society at large. Self-empowerment is equally a problem. Employees who wish to grow and progress on the job are common - but 70% of all employees today report that they are actively looking for a new job and many have a low regard for their companies and their companies' leaders. Opportunities for growth are often diminished as managers and supervisors fail to involve their employees in decisions critical to their companies' success. Yet the status quo prevails. We focus not only on employee self-empowerment but on the personal self-development that many individuals yearn for as they strive to "find their voice" and become the best possible version of themselves. We cite scholars from a broad variety of disciplines in offering their wisdom and add recommendations that can help individuals to acquire the traits and qualities so important to self-improvement. We encourage the readers to invest their time and effort to not only reading this book but to reflecting on its insights. Our intention is to help every reader to discover within themselves abilities and opportunities beyond their expectations as they strive to achieve the success that empowerment and self-empowerment make possible"--

Women and other oppressed and deprived people sometimes collude with the forces that perpetuate injustice against them. Womens acceptance of their lesser claim on household resources like food, their positive attitudes toward clitoridectemy and infibulations, their acquiescence to violence at the hands of their husbands, and their sometimes fatalistic attitudes toward their own poverty or suffering are all examples of adaptive preferences, wherein women participate in their own deprivation. Adaptive Preferences and Womens Empowerment offers a definition of adaptive preference and a moral framework for responding to adaptive preferences in development practice. Khader defines adaptive preferences as deficits in the capacity to lead a flourishing human life that are causally related to deprivation and argues that public institutions should conduct deliberative interventions to transform the adaptive preferences of deprived people. She insists that people with adaptive preferences can experience value distortion, but she explains how this fact does not undermine those peoples claim to participate in designing development interventions that determine the course of their lives. Khader claims that adaptive preference identification requires a commitment to moral universalism, but this commitment need not be incompatible with a respect for culturally variant conceptions of the good. She illustrates her arguments with examples from real-world development practice. Khaders deliberative perfectionist approach moves us beyond apparent impasses in the debates about internalized oppression and autonomous agency, relativism and universalism, and feminism and multiculturalism.

Vulnerability and empowerment are central concepts of contemporary development theory and ethics. Vulnerability associated with human interdependence is a wellspring of values in care ethics, while vulnerability arising from social problems demands remedy, of which empowerment is frequently the just form. Development planners and aid providers focus upon improving the wellbeing of the most vulnerable – especially women – by empowering them economically, socially and politically. Both vulnerability and empowerment are considered in this volume. Drydyk argues that empowerment is necessarily relational, not simply a matter of expanding choices. Koggel reviews Drydyk’s discussion through the lens of feminist relational theory, considering how norms, structures and institutions shape, delimit, and promote empowerment. Presbey examines empowerment in East African women’s lives through the writings and biography of Wangari Maathai. Kosko considers indigenous self-governance and participation in shared governance. Khader reflects upon postcolonial feminist criticism of the concept of adaptive preference. Panitch discusses the economic vulnerability that surrounds the global market in surrogate birth. Pandey provides a review of third world eco-feminist activism and literature. Cudd envisions international humanitarian intervention to support female autonomy against oppressive state and social institutions. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Global Ethics.

Female Ex-Combatants, Empowerment, and Reintegration investigates the role of United Nations-led Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) programs in undermining female ex-combatants’ empowerment. The participation of female combatants in conflict has increasingly been recognized in feminist literatures and in policies and programs concerned with reintegrating ex-combatants and building peace. This has illustrated that female ex-combatants often experience "empowerment" through their role as combatant; however, this empowerment is often lost upon reintegration. UN-led DDR plays an important role in the broader peacebuilding process, as it is one of the largest interventions and directly aims to reintegrate ex-combatants into civilian life. This book draws on extensive field research and interviews with female ex-combatants and DDR officials in Liberia and Nepal to develop a nuanced and comprehensive picture of female ex-combatants’ empowerment and how this is undermined by DDR. Through reconceptualized frameworks of empowerment and an emancipatory peace, the book explores the pivotal role that DDR programs play in undermining female ex-combatants’ empowerment. The author argues that this is detrimental to peacebuilding, because DDR officials and documentation narrate female ex-combatants in limited and gendered ways, which reproduces gendered inequalities and define how female ex-combatants should behave. This book will be of great interest to scholars and practitioners working on gender, conflict, peace, security, and development.

Shows how women's decisions direct their lives in both public and private spheres. The book specifies critical conditions and possibilities for women who want to increase their opportunities. Patterns in women's behaviour and concerns are analyzed by applying the author's sociological theory.

A practical, comprehensive guide to help educators go beyond student engagement and differentiation to achieve student empowerment. Student engagement continues to be an important goal for teachers, but it shouldn’t end there. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to teaching anymore. School districts that have begun to shift their focus from student engagement to student empowerment, and from differentiation to personalized learning, have seen a rise in test scores, motivation, attention, and self-confidence. When students have voice and choice, they gain control over their learning and their actions and feel empowered to work harder and achieve more. Through sample lessons, strategies, and applications, educators will learn how to shift from engagement to student empowerment, from differentiation to personalized learning, and practical ways to make these strategies work in the classroom. Move from engagement to student empowerment with: A comprehensive guide to engaged learning A comprehensive guide to empowerment Research-based best practices to promote empowerment Move from differentiation to personalized learning with: A comprehensive guide to refining differentiation practices A comprehensive guide to personalized learning Practical ways to use voice and choice, instructional design, and classroom climate to promote student empowerment An entire chapter dedicated to the social and emotional learning side of personalized learning Digital content includes reproducible forms and a PDF presentation for professional development.

"This document offers an excellent explanation of the concept of empowerment and develops a very useful framework for disentangling and clarifying the concept. It is both practical and well justified on the basis of the literature. The approach and survey instruments developed to measure empowerment are innovative and very useful. Developing an approach to empirically measure empowerment, and to track empowerment indicators over time in a way that is operationally feasible and consistent with World Bank standards is certainly an outstanding achievement."Reginer Birner, Senior Researc.