I N T E R NAT I O NA L
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2397.2006.00449.x
Int J Soc Welfare 2007: 16: 3 – 11
Empowerment in social work:
an individual vs. a relational
perspective
Leonardsen M. Empowerment in social work: an individual
vs. a relational perspective
Int J Soc Welfare 2007: 16: 3 – 11 © 2006 The Author(s),
Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the
International Journal of Social Welfare.
Social workers with only an individualistic understanding of
empowerment will easily end up as moralising agents rather
than as facilitators for their clients. It is in the complex
interaction between a given socio-material situation and the
individual capacity to interpret and act that one finds the key
to an empowerment worthy of its name. This presupposes two
things: that social workers have as a part of their education
theoretical knowledge about organisational structures, and that
they themselves have been empowered in ways that give them
practical competence to act in relation to situations. They need
the competence to identify the complexities of interests and
power relations in society. The implication of such a recogni-
tion should be clear for the education of social workers: the
ideology of empowerment has to be contextualised. To discuss
this topic the author makes a distinction between an individua-
listic and a relational perspective and between social problems
conceived of as a ‘lack of money’ vs. a ‘lack of meaning’.
Introduction
Towards the end of the twentieth century ‘the sociology
of worry’, or the ‘tradition of progress and cultural
pessimism’ (Rasmussen, 1996), seemed to flourish.
There was a burgeoning literature about welfare crisis,
social exclusion and what Fukuyama (2000) called ‘The
great disruption’ (for an elaboration, see Leonardsen,
2004). Jordan (1996: 21), writing about poverty and
social exclusion, announced that there was ‘urgent concern
to find a new cement for society’.
In this era of ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, 2000)
one can register a chaotic market for the interpretation
of modern social life. Even though many scholars and
politicians from different ideological camps agree that
Western societies are fracturing, the situation is rather
confusing regarding how to explain or understand modern
society and modern social problems. Pluralism in life
styles is mirrored in pluralism in the framework for
interpretation. A combination of a multitude of social
problems and a multitude of professions analysing the
situation has resulted in a chaos of meaning universes
that further escalates the confusion. Let me give just
one illustration: crime prevention. In the early 1990s,
fear of crime was often evoked as the most urgent social
© 2006 The Author(s)
Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare.
Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
J O U R NA L O F
SOCIAL WELFARE
ISSN 1369-6866
Dag Leonardsen
Lillehammer University College, Lillehammer
Key words: contextualisation, contradictions, education, lack of
money, lack of meaning
Dag Leonardsen, Lillehammer University College, 2626 Lilleham-
mer, Norway
E-mail: dag.leonardsen@hil.no
Accepted for publication October 18, 2005
problem when people were asked to rank different
political challenges. Politicians who sought (re-)election
had no chance unless they addressed this topic in a
convincing and confident way. In my office there are
piles of reports on how to prevent crime. It would be a
lie to say that these reports present a consistent message.
As Young (1999: 130) declares, regarding the many
varieties of panacea that have been offered to solve the
crime problem: ‘Take your pick, the fashions come and
go.’ All over the world, governments are struggling to
find the right ‘cure’ against the evil. The way the crime
problem is understood as well as the strategies for
dealing with the problem are – to put it mildly –
conflicting.
However, during the last couple of decades there
seems to have been broad agreement among diverging
schools of thought regarding the importance of empowering
clients. From widely different starting points one can
hear scholars as well as politicians plead the same case:
in spite of good intentions the modern welfare state has
come to play a ‘disempowering’ role in relation to its
subjects. While the political right has tried to redraw
moral borders more rigorously by focusing on individual
responsibility and family values, the political left has
openly admitted that ‘meaning cannot be created
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Leonardsen
administratively’, that is, there are practical as well as
principal limits to state intervention into people’s lives.
At least in Western cultures, the idea of autonomy and
self-reliance as basic values in a society seem to be
broadly accepted.
I feel no need to dissent from this consensus. How-
ever, as already indicated in the title of this article, my
own contribution will be to introduce the essential
distinction between empowerment in an individualistic
and in a relational perspective. Today, ‘empowerment’
has become a catch-all buzzword (like sustainable
development and preventive politics) that obscures
more than it clarifies. My contention in this article will
be twofold:
1. If social workers have nothing but an individualistic
understanding of empowerment, they will end up as
moralising agents, rather than as facilitators who are
able to link the individual empowerment to a broader
comprehension of situatedness. Furthermore, it is
important to differentiate between social problems as
value conflicts and social problems as a matter of
social engineering.
2. A contextualised understanding of empowerment
should be mirrored in the standards for social work
education. If students are to be taught about principles
of empowerment they need to practise empowerment
during the education period.
It is in the complex interaction between a given socio-
material situation and the individual capacity to interpret
and act that one finds the key to an empowerment worthy
of its name. This presupposes that social workers have,
as a part of their education, not only the formal,
theoretical knowledge about social and organisational
structures, but that they themselves have been em-
powered in ways that give them the practical competence
to act in relation to situations, not only in relation to
abstract and context-free individuals (cf. Gillman,
1996). This also presupposes that the social workers
have developed a competence to identify the complexity
of interests and power relations. People whom they
meet and whom they are supposed to assist will always
be socio-economically and culturally situated, and this
situatedness will always reflect some form of power
relations. Or to echo Sartre (1991), human activity can
be described as a project including a certain degree of
freedom. However, the human freedom is fenced in by
facticity (we are deeply rooted in socio-material struc-
tures) and by situations (any human action takes place
in a situation). The implication of such a recognition is
that empowerment as a project has to be contextualised
(Braye & Preston-Shoot, 1995). This insight should be
transmitted not only through a theoretical syllabus in
the social work education, but it should become, so to
speak, an ‘entrepreneurial’ and action-oriented prepared-
ness. A professional social worker needs macro-oriented
4 Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare
knowledge in combination with the ability to be a social
entrepreneur with a good practical judgement (or what
Aristotle called phronesis. For an elaboration on phronetic
knowledge, see Flyvbjerg, 2001).
I would argue that confronted with the complex
mosaic of modern social problems, more attention
within higher education of social workers should be
directed towards what Bacchi (1999) calls the ‘what is
the problem’ approach. According to Bacchi (1999: 21)
this approach ‘highlights the interests and commitments
at stake in postulated solutions, and suggests that
analysts as well as other political actors have interests
and commitments here that cannot be denied’. When
social workers intervene in citizens’ everyday life to
‘help’ them cope with multifarious types of problems
they, of course, do not operate in a vacuum and they do
not (cannot!) act without representing a specific set of
values. Every solution they might present has built into
it a particular representation of what the problem is. Or,
as formulated by Naustadli (1974: 84),
The explanation of connections in the structure of
problems at the same time tells us what are meaningful
solutions and what are not meaningful solutions. . . .
There is a dialectical relation between explanations
and possibilities for change. Our pre-understanding
of basic connections in society will influence how
we choose to explain a phenomenon, while our way
of explaining a phenomenon, to the extent that it
constitutes the premise for practical action, will
produce its own confirmation and thereby contribute
to forming our understanding of connections in
society. In reality, this is the same as saying that
different ways of explaining a phenomenon will
reflect different interests.
In other words, what I argue for is, in a broad meaning of
the word, a politicisation of the concept of empowerment.
Hellesnes (1975) has drawn an important distinction
between indoctrination and politicisation: indoctrination
is defined in a negative way, as a situation where
students learn to understand their own situation with the
thoughts of the educator. This indoctrination can be
explicit or implicit, manifest or latent, but irrespective
of this teaches the educand to adapt to situations that
other people have arranged. Politicisation, on the other
hand, implies that what is true, what is rational, has to be
developed through deliberation and dialogue. Politicised
people do not stick to chieftains and authorities; they
think and act according to discursive rationalities. Social
workers should be politicised in this meaning of the
word, and they should be trained to politicise their clients
so that they get competence and confidence to act upon
situations. To attain such an aim, social work students
themselves have to be empowered during their period
of education. I shall elaborate my arguments on the next
few pages by first specifying four perspectives on our
© 2006 The Author(s)

understanding of social problems, and next, by relating
this discussion to the global standards for social work
education and training as proposed by International
Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) and
the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW).
What is the problem?
Modern society is often described using concepts like
confusing, pluralistic, anomic, risk society, liquid society
and shimmering society. The world that once was united
and consistent more and more appears as a chaotic
melting pot of life-worlds that are hard to interpret and
hard to understand. A pluralistic media structure further
contributes to the confusion by presenting eclectic and
scattered interpretations of modernity.
Before entering a discussion on empowerment, I find
it essential to make a distinction between two sets of
modern welfare problems: poverty (‘lack of money’)
and psycho-social problems (‘lack of meaning’; such as
mental depression, crime, drug abuse and suicide). In
much of the debate regarding the way modern welfare
problems should be addressed, these two sets of problems
are often lumped together. However, safeguarding material
life conditions presents principally a very different
challenge to safeguarding and securing a social and
meaningful life. Accordingly, the strategies that are
needed to counteract the negative implications of material
and social poverty are potentially very different.
In the chaotic market of interpretations that I referred
to above, one further distinction is required, that between
a harmony and a conflict perspective on how to under-
stand modern social problems. Those who identify with
the harmonising perspective apply a pluralist approach
and have more of a focus on appearance than on essence,
more of a focus on symptoms than on structural settings.
Those who support the conflict perspective will look for
the structural framework that surrounds people’s actions.
In the first perspective, one describes unwanted social
phenomena simply as ‘problems’ or (as Mills, 1959, did)
‘troubles’, where these concepts have a pure nominalistic
function. One observes what is missing and then tries to
compensate for them and re-balance the situation.
However, in the second perspective it is more common
to talk of the relevant challenges as ‘contradictions’,
and in a way that indicates a more relational perspec-
tive. Galtung and Nishimura (1975: 19) elaborate the
Table 1. Four different foci for discussing social welfare challenges.
Problems
Lack of money I) Focus on symptoms: shortage of money
Lack of meaning III) Focus on symptoms: individual crisis of meaning.
Comfort. Support.
© 2006 The Author(s)
Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare
Empowerment in social work
essential distinction between problems and contradictions
in this way:
To solve a problem it is sufficient to change a section
or a part of a totality (‘trouble-shooting’); to solve a
contradiction, however, the whole system has to
undergo a qualitative change . . . To overcome a con-
tradiction it is thus necessary to break down some-
thing in order to be able to build something new
– while solving of problems can be regarded as an
attempt to avoid this by attacking the problem ‘locally’.
With the distinction between lack of money and lack
of meaning on the one hand, and between problems and
contradictions on the other, we can differentiate between
four different foci regarding how to understand and
discuss our subject, as shown in Table 1. From this
analytical (and, consequently, simplified) overview we
can look at different types of solutions that logically
flow from these four categories.
1. Lack of money
Lack of money, understood as a problem, is what design-
ates the traditional and non-radical approach. People
in some kind of responsible or authoritative position
observe economic inequalities that are defined as unaccept-
able. The problem is obvious and exists as a given fact.
If people who lag behind economically are supplied
with more money, the problem will be ‘solved’. This
implies that an adequate solution can be found within
the sphere of distribution, and, consequently, it will be
outside the agenda to discuss basic power structures in
society. A satisfying strategy for solving the problem
will be to compensate for missing provisions. Within
this approach one will both find a paternalistic conser-
vative ideology, advocating charity and benevolence,
and a moderate social democratic welfare ideology. In
Norway the role of social workers has to a large extent
turned into a job framed within this way of thinking:
the passive disbursement of financial support. The social
worker mainly occupied with pecuniary problems is a
typical illustration of square I in Table 1.
2. The critical approach
This is what designates a critical approach. At a general
(or macro) level it includes a perspective recommending
Contradictions
II) Focus on relations: some are rich because some are poor.
Avoids demand-based selectivity
IV) Focus on relations: what social patterns do we find?
Who suffers?
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Leonardsen
a basic redistribution of both power and income in
society. In this perspective one recognises that poor
people are structurally situated in ways that make it
very difficult to change their life condition in a funda-
mental manner without addressing broader interdepen-
dencies in society. If some people are poor, this has to
be understood as the final outcome of an asymmetrical
relation of interaction, and it is this asymmetry that has
to be addressed if one is to have a chance of removing
poverty (cf. the parallel discussion regarding rich and
poor countries). While in the first perspective the
challenge is a problem that can be dealt with in an
isolated manner, in the second perspective poverty is
the other side of affluence (Novak, 1996). Poverty as a
relational challenge cannot be abolished by way of
provisions from a benevolent institution. Only by
attacking unjust structures of power and only by attacking
unfair terms of trade in society can the mechanisms that
reproduce inequality be neutralised. The essential
difference between perspective I and II has been
expressed thus by Camara (n.d.), ‘when I give bread to
the poor, they call me a saint; but when I ask why
people are poor, they call me a communist’.
However, for the social worker these macro per-
spectives are of little guidance in their everyday work
with clients. What does perspective II imply when doing
fieldwork? The answer has to be to try to counteract the
Matthew effect: ‘for unto one that hath shall be given,
and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath
not shall be taken away even that which he hath’
(Matthew, 25:29 regarding requests for help). Theories
of availability (Schaffer & Huang, 1975) tell us that it
takes resources to collect resources from public (or
private) bureaucracies. The public sector receives its
legitimacy from its capacity to redistribute resources in
accordance with given criteria. It is by reaching out for
the really needy that social workers can defend their
activity. Unfortunately, the redistributive effects of
bureaucratic welfare systems have been ambivalent
(Goodin & Le Grand, 1987; Le Grand, 1982). There
seem to exist mechanisms of selectivity regarding both
demand and supply. The ideal of empowerment, of
course, is to make clients independent of systems of
help. However, in modern society with intensified
demands regarding efficiency and performance, one
has to remember that pecuniary welfare support is
established as a civil right aimed at compensation. Too
often, street-level bureaucrats end up as the adversary
of the clients rather than their ally and partner. In short,
the relational perspective regarding lack of money
implies fortifying the redistributive qualities of the
welfare system and safeguarding its decommodification
function (Esping-Andersen, 1990). Dowling (1999: 25)
points out this perspective clearly by saying, ‘if social
workers are not to contribute to deepening social
inequalities, they need to be aware of selection, delivery
6 Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare
and rationing systems that can operate against the poor’.
Just as higher income groups have advisers regarding
the tax system, poor people should have their own special
advisers. Empowerment as operative philosophy for the
social worker should not be synonymous with client
independence of public support systems. It should include
safeguarding rights for a decent life for the less successful
among us.
3. Lack of meaning
Lack of meaning, as understood in the non-radical
approach, implies taking Hippocrates seriously: we
should sometimes cure, often relieve, but we always
comfort. People who experience their life as without
meaning need human nearness and consolation. Tradi-
tionally, this has been the approach of ‘moral organisa-
tions’ such as the Salvation Army or comparable
humanitarian movements. Their focus is directed towards
individuals rather than social patterns (i.e. systematic
variations between groups of individuals (in terms of
their class, ethnicity, gender etc.), and, consequently, the
remedying strategy is not contextual.
4. Finding meaning in life
Finding meaning in life could be defined as an individual
project. According to the fourth perspective, however,
‘meaning’ is per definition regarded as a relational
challenge. Most of all, human beings are social creatures
and their identity is based on interaction with other
people. It is by mirroring ourselves in the eyes of the
Other, and it is by continually spending time in close
company and meaningful interaction with others that
people become human. This elementary sociological
insight is – it might seem – often forgotten in the
discussion of how to approach the modern crisis of
meaning. The more we are able to move two steps back
and observe how these challenges appear in a systematic
way in our society, the easier it will be able to act
strategically at a societal level. The moment we are able
to identify patterns of illness, patterns of addictions,
patterns of crimes and so on, we will be forced to
extend our perspective and strategies for coping with
the meaning crisis as a sociological topic. As I see it,
the way different social problems appear in systematic
patterns tells a silent story that should be interpreted
sociologically; that is, at a trans-individual level.
Let me give but one illustration: crime is traditionally
defined as a problem that is attacked at the individual
level. I accept that crime is an action carried out by
responsible actors who should take responsibility for
their misdeeds. However, if we, at the societal level,
define crime as a conflict, we immediately add a relational
perspective, where many more questions than that of
individual morality are brought into the discussion. In
© 2006 The Author(s)

the same way that one could argue that some people are
poor because some are rich, one can argue that some
people experience a crisis of meaning because some
define social and communal life as the aggregate effect
of individual, rational choices. The last perspective is
nothing but a pure Adam Smith ideology: we reach the
common best by maximising individual freedom of
choice. The alternative way of seeing things would be
to argue in the manner proposed by Hirsch (1976: 177):
Rather than the pursuit of self-interest contributing
to the social good, pursuit of the social good contri-
butes to the satisfaction of self-interest. The problem
is that the latter pursuit needs to be deliberately
organised under existing standards and instincts of
personal behaviour. So the invisible hand is presently
unavailable where it is newly needed.
What does this rather abstract perspective imply for
social workers desiring to empower their clients? Being
well aware of running the danger of over-simplifying a
rather complex topic, let me briefly say this. I take the
rise of the communitarian movement in Western societies
as an indication of the ‘individual freedom gained vs.
the community lost’ syndrome (Leonardsen, 2004). As
the market society has gained impetus over the last
couple of decades, it is no surprise that indications of
atomisation and alienation appear. Certainly, those who
have the human capital it takes to make the most of the
competitive society have much to gain within this
system. However, an increasing minority in Western
societies will almost certainly discover that a loss of
human capital soon turns into a loss of social capital.
Withdrawal and isolation will be the logical consequ-
ences. Empowering people who experience the accom-
panying loss of meaning must address the social and
relational aspect of this crisis. This means that building
networks and creating alliances among the excluded should
gain the most attention. The logical strategy following
from this type of perspective should be to support the
establishment of self-help groups and at the same time
stimulate these people to act as an organised group.
With this somewhat schematic classification into
two ways of interpreting social challenges (as problems
vs. contradictions) and two ways of categorising these
challenges (as a lack of money vs. a lack of meaning),
we can address the main analytical topic of this article:
a discussion of empowerment in an individualistic vs.
relational perspective.
Empowerment in an individualistic vs. relational
perspective
As Humphries (1996) correctly observes, over the past
10 years or so a plethora of books and articles on
empowerment have appeared. These books have largely
represented empowerment in reductionist and simplistic
© 2006 The Author(s)
Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare
Empowerment in social work
ways, implying that empowerment is simply a matter of
will, either on the part of those who are disempowered,
or on the part of those in a position to empower. In much
of this literature, there is an absence of any context for
discussions of empowerment or any questions as to why
empowerment is a concept claimed by advocates right
or left of the political spectrum, or as to its popularity
at this historical moment.
The burgeoning literature on empowerment has made
this statement more controversial today than it was
10 years ago. Not the least due to feminist and post-
modernist research on women’s empowerment (which
holds by far the most uniform theoretical perspectives)
reductionist perspectives have been challenged (Benhabib,
1992; Fawcett, Featherstone, Fook & Rossiter, 2000;
Presser & Sen, 2000). The continual focus in this
research on questions related to oppression, the possi-
bility of ‘innocent’ knowledge and preconditions for
political change, has challenged a simplistic and taken-
for-granted conception of what social work is all about.
As Rossiter (2000: 24) notes:
[P]ostmodern feminism has undermined the conven-
tional rationality of social work at two basic levels.
It has initiated a crisis of knowledge, raising such
questions as ‘how do we know what we know?’ and
‘what authorises social work’s claim to special
knowledge?’ It has also produced a crisis of identity
as the postmodern critique casts doubts on social
work’s historical assumption about the innocence of
providing help.
Rossiter adds that progressive social work shares a great
deal of the political intentions of feminism. I sympathise
with this statement and want to define the present article
as a contribution to the debate on critical social work.
As Parsloe (1996) shows, empowerment is a slippery
concept that is open to manipulation by different
ideologies. Within a critical social science one has to
go beyond micro-oriented perspectives and ask if
empowerment in the context of social conservatism
means exactly the same as empowerment would mean
in a more radical context. If not, where would the essential
demarcations go? Let me proceed in this discussion by
returning to Table 1 introduced above.
Empowerment in the non-radical meaning
When I talk about a discussion on empowerment that
might suffer from a possible individualistic fallacy, it is
obviously the left column in the Table 1 I have in mind.
Within this conceptual universe a voluntaristic ideology
dominates, implying that a more or less moralistic under-
tone is revealed.
Let me first comment on square I.
I have described modern society as a threshold society.
By this I mean a society where labour markets tend to
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Leonardsen
become more and more closed, demanding increasingly
better qualifications for job-seekers. If one does not
possess the right human capital, one is all too easily
excluded from all types of market-generated incomes
and forced to turn to public welfare or charities. To the
extent that modern society corresponds to the above
description, it becomes ethically problematic to force an
empowerment argument on economic questions. Anderson
(1996: 22) gives a good illustration of this point:
An individual approach that failed to address root
causes occurred in a programme with women living
in poverty in the USA offering training in budgeting
skills, job searching, stress management and nutrition
(Thurston, 1989). It failed to consider how ‘budgeting’
an inadequate amount of money, searching for non-
existent jobs, and knowing about nutrition while being
unable to buy adequate food, could simply add to the
stress the women were being trained to manage. This
tendency to individualise and pathologise just response
to unjust situations sees the problem lying with feck-
less and inadequate individuals who are in poverty
because of their own deficiencies, rather than ques-
tioning the structures that inevitably lead to haves
and have-nots.
Of course, the ideal is that people are able to provide
for themselves, but this argument can primarily turn out
to be a crack of the whip within the existing structure
of modern society. When the structural framework
seriously restricts the universe of potentialities one
should become very aloof in the language of empower-
ment. Or rather, one should be very clear as to what
one precisely means when one argues for empowerment
in this regard. And to be even more explicit, the New
Right argumentation, maintaining that each individual
should take more responsibility in finding a job,
becomes problematic, due to the structural conditions
that surround those possessing human capital that is not
in demand (cf. project vs. facticity and situation, in
Sartre’s [1991] terminology).
Next (square III), one could argue that in the modern
Western world, problems of meaning have become, if
not the main, at least the most complicated social challenge
to address. If there has been a plethora of books on
empowerment in the last few decades, the same should
be said regarding books on trust, community and social
capital. As already mentioned, there is broad agreement
that meaning cannot be created administratively. Some
will even argue that public involvement regarding how
people should live their lives will function counter-
productively. Public responsibility and well-meaning
professions will kill, rather than stimulate, individual
responsibility (see the telling title, Disabling professions
by Illich, Zola & McKnight, 1977). Consequently, the
answer should be empowerment, rather than public and
professional support. By ‘public and professional support’
8 Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare
I am talking about the classical Weberian perspective
(bureaucratic professionalism based on the careful
management of expert knowledge) and not about some
of the feminist writers (Fawcett et al., 2000; Presser &
Sen, 2000; Worell & Remer, 1992) and postmodern
perspectives (Foucault, 1980, 1989), taking either com-
munity work/civil society and/or facilitator approaches
as their starting point.
However, people are situated differently in social and
material terms. If the general message to groups of people
experiencing some kind of meaning crisis is little more
than empowerment, one offers them responsibility
without power. If the discourse on empowerment
conceals continued class, race and gender exploitation,
one will end up blaming victims who have few chances
of breaking their chains. There is an important distinc-
tion between power to (the capacity to act) and power
over (dominion or domination) (see Anderson, 1996),
and the debate on empowerment should pay due atten-
tion to how capacity to act is closely linked to economic
and political power.
To the extent that empowerment is interpreted as
an individual project, one misses two essential facts:
(i) that human beings are social beings, and as such
they are dependent on others, and (ii) that social life
worlds are socio-materially situated, which implies that
groups of people have widely differing chances of
living what we vaguely call a meaningful life (which is
not synonymous with an affluent life). Unless advocates
for empowerment pay due attention to these two
statements one will end up in an individualistic and
moralistic trap.
If we turn to square II (lack of money as a con-
tradiction), the main message regarding empowerment
is that social clients are people who are often regarded
as having a low value – both in their own eyes and in
others. In a market society, having a low value is
synonymous with not being noticed. As a consequence,
this turns the low value into an even worse situation:
no value.
Today there is a real conflict between a very demand-
ing economic and technological structure on the one
side, and individuals with more practical than theoretical
qualifications on the other. Unfortunately, there is not
much discussion on the social, ethical and political
implications of this mismatch. The simplest solution, of
course, is to increase the demands placed on the labour
force: improve its human capital (which often means
theoretically) and improve its efficiency. Is this what is
meant by empowerment in this regard?
To me, a more adequate answer would entail giving
clients as a collective group increased confidence, such
as valuing themselves more highly. Empowerment should
mean recognition of value as a politically defined
concept. It is not a kind of natural logic that distributes
scarce resources the way this is done today. A deeper
© 2006 The Author(s)

knowledge of this among groups that have a low status
in the labour market would contribute to a type of
empowerment that I would define as essential. The
solution of the poverty problem is not very different
from the solution of the affluence problem. Economic
challenges have to be solved as economic challenges,
not as campaigns against individuals to lift themselves
by their own bootstraps. ‘In so far an economy is so
arranged that slumps occur, the problem of unemploy-
ment becomes incapable of personal solution’ (Mills,
1959: 16–17).
Finally, let us turn to square IV. Since the Chicago
School it has been common knowledge in sociology
that social problems have a socio-demographic dimen-
sion. In Oslo, the relative difference in illness between
the west (rich) and the east (poor) is more or less the
same today as one hundred years ago (Toresen & Brevik,
2004). Bus drivers and sales staff living in the eastern
part of the city have essentially a shorter life expectancy
than lawyers and doctors on the western side, and
westerners have significantly fewer social problems.
What implications should this type of information have
regarding empowerment?
As Mills (1959) emphasised, it is important to
differentiate between issues and troubles. Issues are
matters that transcend the local environment of the
individual and concern the broader society and its
structure. Troubles, on the other hand, have to do with
private affairs; values cherished by an individual and
felt to be threatened. To the extent that a crisis of
meaning exists as a broader sociocultural phenomenon
we should confront this as an issue. How do we attack
such a task? Mills points out that issues often involve
a crisis in institutional arrangements in a society, and
that such crises should often be read as a contradiction
or an antagonism. In other words, we are talking about
relational or contextual challenges. Such challenges are
supra-individual; they belong to structures out of the
reach of single individuals. Black people in the US have
succeeded in abolishing much of the oppression they
experienced some decades ago. Women in Western
countries have also succeeded in their fight for formal
equal rights. Gay people are on the political agenda
with their demands. To the extent that they have been
successful it has been qua groups and by acting on
behalf of a collective interest. It is via collective action
that issues can gain momentum.
Poor people, on the other hand, have not been very
successful in the Western world over the last 20 to
30 years. One reason is related to a basic characteristic
of this group: it is, to use Sartre’s (1991) concept, a
‘series’ – not a group. There are few things that unite
people in poverty, and therefore they have not developed
a collective identity. To be able to act collectively requires
being united and having a common definition of the
situation. If a meaning crisis exists as a general problem,
© 2006 The Author(s)
Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare
Empowerment in social work
this problem has to be addressed as a challenge to
create a collective consciousness that might prepare for
collective action. Empowerment regarding this question
is consequently related to the ability to organise and
‘educate’ people so that they can abolish the oppressive
framework.
Consequences for the education of social workers
From the above discussion, the following can be learnt:
first of all, that empowerment as a strategy to support
people in need of help has to pay due attention to
economic, political and cultural structures that limit an
individual’s freedom to choose. These structures are
hard to manipulate for social workers in their practical
activity and it is far from obvious how the practitioner
should relate to this framework. The importance of
safeguarding a preventive perspective in social work is
certainly broadly accepted, but it is not easy to be precise
about what it actually means. Expectations directed to
the practitioner can easily be exaggerated in this regard
and more attention and effort should be directed to the
question: what does a relational perspective on empower-
ment imply for the education of social workers?
During the last years the International Association of
Schools of Social Work and the International Federation
of Social Workers have invested much time and energy
in working out global standards for social work educa-
tion and training (IASSW/IFSW, 2005). Their goal has
been to arrive at ‘an agreed set of standards whereby
high quality training could be assured’ (IASSW/IFSW,
2004: 1). Since this is a document that tries to set a
professional agenda for social work I will relate my
principal argumentation above to some of the main
perspectives in this document.
A number of points are proposed for the core purpose
of social work IASSW/IFSW focus (abbreviated version):
• to include marginalised people
• to address and challenge barriers, inequalities and
injustices in society
• to enhance well-being and problem-solving capacities
among people
• to encourage people to engage in advocacy with
regard to pertinent concerns
• to advocate changes in those policies and structural
conditions that maintain people in marginalised,
dispossessed and vulnerable positions, for and with
people
• to work towards the protection of people who are not
in a position to do so themselves
• to engage in social and political action to impact social
policy and economic development, and to effect
change by critiquing and eliminating inequalities
• to enhance harmonious societies and promote respect
for cultures, ideologies and religions.
9
Leonardsen
In general, I support the values expressed in this list
and I have little to add as long as we stick to purposes
and what we could call the policy aims. Chambon and
Irving (1999: 265–66) argue convincingly that the
profession of social work has ‘to examine the functions
served by our discipline and the consequences of our
services’. The global standards developed by IASSW
and IFSW mirror such an acknowledgement. Social
workers can never become neutral and disengaged
benefactors in a society of inequalities and injustice.
The core values represent the logical recognition of
such a position, and they raise high expectations for
future social workers.
I have two critical and supplementary remarks to the
IASSW/IFSW document; one related to the stated core
values, and one related to how these standards may be
reached. The first question relates to what is being
passed on to social work students, the second is about
how ideas and knowledge are imparted, that is, an
educational question.
To avoid the classical burn-out syndrome that often
hits social workers, it is important to adapt our ambi-
tions to a realistic evaluation of our capacities. In that
case we have to recall how social problems often should
be regarded as value conflicts (Leonardsen, 2004). As
noted by George and Wilding (1985: 118), ‘the economic
system and the welfare system, therefore, require and
depend on quite different value systems’. This means
that there is no social engineering solution to this type
of problem as long as they refer to the macro level.
Value conflicts can only be solved in the sphere of moral
choice. Or, as Worell and Remer (1992: 52) emphasise
when writing on empowerment for women, ‘changes in
sociocultural structures and practices must occur if
women’s health needs are to be addressed’. Social
workers, qua professionals, will often have to confront
value-related dilemmas, but they should not be encum-
bered with expectations to solve the type of value
conflicts that really belong to the sphere of politics (i.e.
the fundamental framing of everyday life situations). In
short, social work education has to help students clarify
what it means in practical life to fight barriers,
inequalities and injustices that exist in society. To the
extent that social problems are expressions of deeper
economic, organisational and technological pressures,
these pressures cannot be abolished by some ingenious
empowerment strategies. By saying this I am not arguing
for a separation in social work between a practical,
instrumental agency and value-infected political work.
Such a separation is neither desirable nor possible.
However, it is urgent in educating social workers to
bring forward the unequivocal message that some types
of problems should be addressed through their trade
unions or interest organisations and some types of
problems can be dealt with in the sphere of client-based
professional social work. This, I think, should be stated
10 Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare
more explicitly in the IASSW/IFSW document. Today,
there is too much vague and non-obliging political
rhetoric about the importance of giving priority to
preventive work rather than repairing, and the concep-
tions of empowerment are too vague.
Moving from the question of what (the content of
education) to the question of how (the principles of
pedagogy) my main message is that if students of political
science are to learn about democracy they should be
educated within a fully democratic university or college.
Correspondingly, if students of social work are to learn
about empowerment they should practice their role as
students in a fully empowered way. This is nothing
but an application of the principle of correspondence
between theory and practice.
If we want to understand the quality of an educa-
tional programme it is not enough to study the core
values, the syllabus, the curriculum and the lectures. As
is well known from organisational theory, any educa-
tional institution has a hidden curriculum implanted in
the organisational structure. If social work students
learn (theoretically) about empowerment while studying
within a hierarchical and undemocratic organisational
structure, the final outcome will most certainly be
disappointment. This acknowledgement is probably not
very controversial. However, if this statement is taken
to its full consequence I would guess that social work
education and training around the world would need
some important revisions. If ‘the pedagogics of the
oppressed’ (Freire, 1995) is introduced not only as a
theoretical perspective but as a principle for practical
organisation of life on campus, then students would
experience a more integrated, corporeal experience of
learning.
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