Abstract
This book is about how empowerment practice espoused in American social welfare policy fail to use rigorous methodology to empirically measure outcomes, how empowerment practices (embodied mostly in clinical interventions) promote unintended paradoxical outcomes for clients and communities, and how empowerment practice and its ideologies have more to do with routinized ceremonial practices and client adaptation and compliance—than they do with facilitating liberating changes within oppressive social structures. Further, this text addresses how empowerment practices can masquerade as professional knowledge and practice by those who are anointed and sanctioned to speak for others (whether solicited or not), by giving voice for choices to the oppressed. In other words, empowerment is critiqued more as a civic process than as a practice method that may catalyze change.
William Epstein pens plenty of punch in this 111-page, three-chapter book. He builds, in part, upon his earlier perspective in “Romantic Social Work” (Epstein, 2012), wherein the practice of social work empowerment and policy provides a so-called romantic civic function that primarily affirms an individual’s will, as one of the pillars of the great American values, necessary to pursue the American dream. Hence, Epstein examines empowerment more in terms of its function and less in terms of its substance, and he deems that the process and functioning of empowering trump its espoused transformative powers. As such, the functions of empowerment are to uphold prevailing cultural values and norms, similar to the ways Durkheim saw religion as proving legitimatization and cohesion to social structure and values.
The author thoughtfully introduces readers to the concept of ceremony in its sociological and anthropological contexts and astutely applies it to the multiple dimensions of empowerment. In particular, he examines the cultural function of ceremony, whereby ceremony is an activity that only sediments individualistic values and reinforces traditions and norms, without ever having the purpose of making substantive changes in oppressive social structures. He states, “…the purpose of empowerment practice is to symbolize the elevated status of the relatively powerless” (Epstein, 2013, p. 11). He recognizes that empowerment practices were originally grounded and legitimated upon radical traditions (e.g., Freire), yet most empowerment practices fail to transform or liberate the oppressed. Instead, empowerment as ceremony politely affirms variant subcultures as needing to comply with existing norms, thus implicitly demanding the cultivation of self-reliance. Thus, when self-reliance fails, it is indicative of deficits in the self, not in the environment of social welfare systems. Any shortcomings to improving ones cultural and/or socioeconomic status are associated with needing to perfect and promote individualism and are never associated with making substantive changes in the larger social order.
The voluminous nature of empowerment literature in the helping professions, its expanding topical count in key word searches, and much anecdotal research of its efficacy are carefully noted by Epstein. The working transformational definitions of empowerment are highly varied among and outside professional disciplines. The word “empowerment” is used in a platitudinal yet compelling and seductive fashion but retains its luster and allure similar to the “mega-word” therapeutic. Epstein briefly traces the context of empowerment in the works of Freire and Fanon as a radical enterprise and documents the failure of Freire’s efforts to promote the notion of “conscientization.” He cites the conceptual shifting of empowerment and postulates that empowerment practices espouse several outcomes: to increase power among the powerless; to increase self-efficacy; to give voice and choice; to increase competencies and assets; to promote social justice; and to liberate the individual from self-defeating feelings and cognitions through psychotherapies.
The author contends that empowerment practices have failed to realize, much less evaluate, their espoused outcomes. He believes empowerment, now “…has retreated from politics and social development, becoming complicit as symbol and ceremony, with the very society it pretends to transform” (Epstein, 2013, p. 21). The author then examines several social movements that have utilized empowerment practices. Examples of such are Black empowerment, empowering women of color, empowering all women, Latino community organization empowerment, empowerment in psychotherapy, evaluation of empowerment practices, and finally, establishing effective outcomes. He draws the conclusion that empowerment is more “street theater” rather than a set of refined social service pragmatic tools. In a rather convincing fashion, he argues that empowerment evaluation lacks rigor, methodological integrity, and flawed design and usually only investigates intentions, not outcomes. Thus for him, empowerment research is “spongy” and more about the processes and convictions of the provider, rather than about the empirically measured achievements and outcomes for clients.
Following from that mentioned earlier, he concludes his book with the culminating chapter entitled “A Knowing Misadventure.” Here he argues empowerment as a ritual is more of psychotherapeutic and clinical intervention than a transformative procedure aimed at remediation of American inequalities. The ceremonializing of empowerment continues with an almost repetition compulsion to once again provide stale, ineffective rhetorical solutions to emerging social problems. He creatively describes the relationship between empowerment and policy romanticism as an endeavor celebrating American individualism as self-evident truths. Thus, approaches to alleviating oppression are mostly centered on psychotherapeutic core values and the aggrandizement of the ego. Good intentions to liberate the oppressed are not matched equally with investigations about outcomes. Empowerment is a practice that is based on ceremony, neo-liberalism, American exceptionalism, false consciousness, and a “waste of reformist energy” (Epstein, 2013, p. 88).
William Epstein recognizes that his conclusions about empowerment practice are speculative and that any rigorous research designs using experimental and/or control groups to uncover the causes of social outcomes are difficult to implement. Nonetheless, in his usual brilliantly captivating expressive writing style, he makes a persuasive argument questioning the overall effectiveness of empowerment practices. This book should be read by social work educators and scholars, policy makers, helping professionals, and by those who are publicly minded intellectuals. His command of the history of American social policy, the practice of social welfare, and his amalgamation of sociological and political literature significantly enrich his arguments. This book is a significant contribution to the social work profession and scholarship, which should cause a long and deep pause about our thinking concerning teaching and promoting empowerment practices as a core, efficacious practice strategy and valued ideology. Epstein provides a corrective lens to understanding how empowerment practices in human services and social policy function to uphold and help the oppressed adapt to narcissistic American values rather than to change underlying social policy and political forces that favor the privilege by further delimiting the redistribution of resources and opportunities. This book joins, in my opinion, the likes of the works by Frances Piven and Richard Cloward in their book, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, and the work of Bob Mullaly in Structural Social Work: Ideology, Theory and Practice. Epstein questions critically the negative outcomes for clients in social welfare programs who are caught up in a “people processing” maze, designed to further promote the power and false beneficence of the privilege. Good intentions, empathizing, speaking for others, and creating an illusion of choices will never be sufficient to produce fundamentally lasting changes through the redistribution of wealth and opportunities.