Empowerment as guidance for professional social work: an act of balancing on a slack rope

Abstract

The goals of empowerment raise new challenges for the social work professions. From being in an authoritative position the professionals should behave more like partners and advocates on the users’ terms. The development creates further uncertainty and dilemmas since the ideological sources of empowerment are very different. One important source is the radical, activist movements among service users, but empowerment is also an important part of the liberalist vocabulary when it argues for a marketisation of the welfare services. At the same time the different positions agree on some of the same kind of solutions, as for instance direct payments and personal assistance. The first part of the article presents the concept of empowerment and shows how the different ideological positions try to create their own images of the concept. The second part discusses the challenges the growing popularity of empowerment raises for the professions and what dilemmas professionals who want to found their work on an empowerment model will face. It calls attention to the demands for competencies and qualifications raised by the empowerment debate and discusses potential dangers, which the empowerment philosophy creates because of its unclear ideological base. The examples used to illustrate the discussions are mainly from professional work among people with disabilities.