twelve - Partnership – participation – power: the meaning of empowerment in post-industrial society
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2022
Summary
Perhaps never before has the dominant class felt so free in exercising their manipulative practice. Reactionary postmodernity has had success in proclaiming the disappearance of ideologies and the emergence of a new history without social classes, therefore without antagonistic interests, without class struggle. They preach that there is no need to continue to speak about dreams, utopia or social justice….
Weakened religiosity and the inviability of socialism have resulted in the disappearance of antagonisms, the postmodern reactionary triumphantly says, suggesting in his pragmatic discourse that it is now the duty of capitalism to create a special ethics based on the production of equal players or almost equal players. Large questions are no longer political, religious or ideological. They are ethical but in a healthy capitalist sense of ethics.…
We, therefore, don’t have to continue to propose a pedagogy of the oppressed that unveils the reasons behind the facts or provokes the oppressed to take up critical knowledge or transformative action. We no longer need a pedagogy that questions technical training or is indispensable to the development of a professional comprehension of how and why society functions. What we need to do now, according to this astute ideology, is focus on production without any preoccupation about what we are producing, who it benefits, or who it hurts. (Freire, 1998, pp 83-4)
In this chapter the terms ‘empowerment’ and ‘partnership’ will be compared and contrasted. ‘Empowerment’ will be used as a benchmark against which the claims of ‘partnership’ will be tested. That is to say ‘partnership’ will be evaluated according to whether it facilitates, is neutral towards, or has negative consequences for empowerment. The word empowerment will be used specifically in the sense given to it by the Brazilian educator and founder member of the Workers’ Party, Paulo Freire. Heaney has summarised this thus:
Empowerment – For poor and dispossessed people, strength is in numbers and social change is accomplished in unity. Power is shared, not the power of a few who improve themselves at the expense of others, but the power of the many who find strength and purpose in a common vision. Liberation achieved by individuals at the expense of others is an act of oppression. Personal freedom and the development of individuals can only occur in mutuality with others. (Heaney, 1995)
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- Partnership WorkingPolicy and Practice, pp. 243 - 260Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2001
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