You are not responsible for being down, but you are responsible for getting up. Über Empowerment

Empowerment is both a value orientation and an organizing principle for helping people to gain mastery over their lives. Since its emergence in the seventies it has become a key element as well of participatory strategies for organizations and communities as of personal growth programs and is applied to a variety of topics and fields, e.g. community psychology, social work, education, grassroots movements, development co-operation, and human resource management. While reconstructing the heterogeneous roots of the concept and analysing the inherent theory of power, its immanent anthropological and psychological assumptions, and its methods the paper outlines the specific rationality and the paradoxes of this contemporary technology of citizenship.