The meaning of empowerment: the interdisciplinary etymology of a new management concept

Empowerment has become a widely used management term in the last decade or so, though, in practical terms, it shares the ambiguity of its predecessors in the HRM tradition. This paper sets out to unravel the web of meaning surrounding empowerment to show what a contested concept it is, and hence why its application in organizational settings is fraught with misunderstanding and tension. It does so by taking an approach that contributes to the examination of HRM discourse and management rhetoric. To demonstrate the ambiguity of empowerment as a concept, the paper reviews the various ways in which the term has been used across non-management disciplines (women, minority groups, education, community care, politics), culminating with a review of the use of empowerment in contemporary management theory. The paper concludes that organizations and managers have chosen to coin a phrase which is open to different, sometimes contradictory, meanings and which, when applied, evokes both subjective attitudes and objective behaviour, means different things in varying contexts, and is affected fundamentally by individual differences in perception and experience. Unless organizations offer clear operational definitions when using empowerment, instead of purely acquiescing to a vague and seductive version of the concept, they are abdicating responsibility for the unpredictable consequences that result.     

PTSD and the Vietnam veteran: the battle for treatment

1. Patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) often encounter treatment that is complicated by professional bias, personal issues, countertransference, and pathological staff dynamics. 2. Treatment is further complicated by diagnostic confusion, the dual diagnoses of substance abuse or depression, and symptoms that mimic personality disorders or psychosis. 3. The special circumstances of the Vietnam conflict that contributed to the susceptibility and etiology of PTSD are the individual characteristics of those who served, the special nature of the war itself and the military strategies used, and the psychosocial and cultural milieu in which it occurred.     

Eliciting survey cooperation: incentives, self-interest, and norms of cooperation

Given the weaker ties to community as noted by scholars such as Robert Putnam, survey researchers should not be surprised by a decline in survey participation over the past 10 years. This research analyzes the use of incentives coupled with introductory themes emphasizing cooperation and helpfulness--cooperative norms in American society--to understand their effects on survey response. This article analyzes two separate experiments (one phone and one mail) that provide evidence that norms of cooperation matter in the decision to participate in a survey, suggesting that this is particularly true at the refusal conversion stage. These results indicate that survey researchers may use such themes to their advantage, especially when conducting a nonresponse follow-up in a mail survey.     

Psychiatric Disorder Dramaturgically Considered*

This paper reports the results of an investigation into the empirical applicability of conceptualizing mental illness as dramaturgic incompetence and a corresponding attempt to operationalize dramaturgical thought. It was found that dramaturgic incompetence and subsidiary components were strongly associated with degree of psychiatric disturbance and general diagnosis as determined by psychiatric staff. It also was found that attainment of psychiatric identities proceeded through a series of stages consisting of performative incompetence, empathic incompetence, motive incompetence, meaning loss, and identity loss. This sequence was particularly evident in cases of psychosis.     

Assaultive behavior: know the risks.

1. Violence in our society is an increasing national concern, and violence in health-care settings reflects this trend. Assaultive episodes continue to increase in health-care settings due to various cultural, sociological, and political factors. 2. Present administrative and educational solutions to the problems of assault have failed to decrease the incidence and, in fact, may contribute to the increasing number of assaultive episodes. 3. Psychiatric staff can reduce incidence of assault by recognizing the risk factors and designing styles and interventions with these factors in mind. 4. Risks most often associated with assault are history of assault, diagnosis of dementia or organic brain disorder, intoxication from drugs or alcohol, and from the characteristics of the milieu and treatment itself.     

The role of reflexive thought in the achievement of intercultural competence

ABSTRACT

Reflexivity refers to the capacity for individuals to understand the cultural system and manage their own position within it. Reflexivity is a key concept in the understanding of intercultural communication, particularly in recognising the ability for individuals to understand and adapt to new cultural contexts. However, the prevailing methods used in intercultural communication (namely that of intercultural competencies) do not place a great emphasis on the role of reflexivity in achieving cultural adaptation. In this paper, I argue for the central positioning of the concept of reflexivity in intercultural education as a mechanism which mediates between intercultural experiences and individual behaviour. I present evidence of the reflexive sequence (subject-object-subject) from the reflections of a cohort of students (n = 19). Finally, I suggest a pedagogical instrument (a heuristic) for empirically exploring reflexivity in intercultural communication.     

Solo-living and childless professional women: Navigating the ‘balanced mother ideal’ over the fertile years

One in five women are childless at midlife, and for an estimated 90 percent of these women, childlessness is not actively chosen. In this article, we explore how solo-living and childless professional women navigate the ‘balanced mother ideal’ over their fertile years and what this means for organizations and organization studies. Drawing on biographical narrative interview data from solo-living professional women in the UK, we argue that identifications with the balanced mother ideal change over the life course as a result of futurity, ambivalence, and suppression of negative emotions—part of the logic of both postfeminism and neoliberal feminism—and the ‘disenfranchized grief’ of contingent childlessness. At the point of late fertility, the absence of alternative social narratives to the balanced mother ideal appears to create a crisis point for childless women, including in the workplace. We conclude our article with recommendations for how organizations can better cater to the needs of this significant, yet largely silenced, demographic group.     

An examination of the ISO 9001:2000 standard and its influence on the integration of management systems

Abstract

Analysis of the literature and examination of the various models of integration and testing in the field, have revealed five key issues relating to management system integration. This paper examines the recently published ISO 9001 : 2000 quality management system standard to see how it addresses these issues, under the headings of compatibility, scope and organizational culture. The examination reveals that while compatibility with the ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 standards has been improved in some areas, a different approach and model of a management system has been used. The paper suggests that differences in the scope of the standards are also likely to give rise to different sub-cultures which will hinder integration, and scope and culture are more important than compatibility. This leads the authors to conclude that new models of integration should be based on an approach and definitions which can be used in any management system, as well as an integrated one. Models of an integrated management system should also emphasize the need for no significant differences in the scope of the integrated systems, and a strong culture which supports the main requirements of TQM.