Social Empowerment

Abstract

To look at empowerment in the context of social quality entails two challenges: first the necessity to locate the orthogonality and embeddedness of empowerment in the context of discussing the other conditional factors; second, the elaboration of the specificity of social empowerment and its distinctiveness in relation to other theories of empowerment. The first question is, how is social empowerment linked to and actually defined by the other conditional factors? The questions in the second challenge are has empowerment a distinct meaning in the context of the social quality theory — distinct when compared with the understanding in other contexts? How is it differentiated in relation for instance to empowerment in the context of social work, learning theories and others? Of course these questions are interrelated and, in fact, we have to answer both questions simultaneously.