Finding Your Voice

Abstract

The concept of empowerment has enjoyed a brisk rise to fame over the last decade in diverse areas such as social policy and organisational development. As ever, popularisation has brought corruption and one finds the term being used today, for example, to disguise new forms of exploitation at work built upon Human Resource Management ideologies (Foster & Hoggett, 1999). Nevertheless, ambiguous as the term is for the time being it seems worth persevering with it, particularly because it highlights the way in which human emancipation and the exercise of power are inextricably mixed up.