About empowerment...

In the United States, empowerment strategies emphasizing commitments that are brief, informal, and fun have proved tone deaf to the political importance of associations. If civic engagement is to play a role in social change, citizens must realize that voluntary associations also depend on conflict and professionalization—as well as a prominent role on the part of the state.

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Empower What?

While the term “empower” has only recently been introduced in France (where it is translated as “capacitation” or “encapacitation”), it now completely permeates American civic life. “Empowerment” refers to “the process by which an individual or a group acquires the means to bolster their capacity for action, allowing them to accede to individual or collective power. [This concept] connects two ideas: that of power, which is the root of the word itself, and that of a learning process, which is necessary to achieve it.” [1] Yet even this definition seems reductive, given the range of meanings the term has assumed. The term is used to describe programs financed by the state and international organizations, as well as organizations that are more “bottom-up” and autonomous. The term was first used by community organizers and feminists, [2] but, for over twenty years, it has been appropriated by international organizations (like UNESCO and the World Bank), management theory, and by American voluntary associations, for which it has acquired the status of a keyword.

A careful observer of American civic life, Eliasoph dwells on this discourse as a way of considering what she calls “Empowerment Projects.” She uses this term to refer as much to tutoring associations as charities and black or Latino community organizations. All aspire to emancipate their members through participation in community-oriented activities. By picking up trash along the highway, collecting food for the homeless, or organizing parties for sick children in hospitals, they maintain, individuals become true citizens—open, tolerant, and civic-minded. These organizations are essentially hybrid in nature, in their funding (i.e., public or private) as well as in their membership, which ranges from middle-class people who crave civic commitment to marginalized adolescents who need ways to spend their weekends or vacations. Such pluralistic membership is expected to promote individual empowerment, thanks to the change in hearts and minds that supposedly occurs through the encounter with otherness (be it social, racial, or generational).

The entire goal of Eliasoph’s book is to identify the norms of American civic life. To this end, for more than four years she studied a number of associations as a participant-observer. She unveils patterns in social interaction that reveal themselves when the normal course of events is interrupted by grammatical errors. Particularly attentive to discourse, she highlights the use of the “Empowerment Talk” that participants so often employ. This discourse places special value on participation, inclusion, diversity, tolerance, innovation, and flexibility. Yet while it aims to be generous, one of the basic characteristics of this discourse is its tendency to downplay structural inequalities and power relations. Eliasoph offers numerous examples of this dynamic. No doubt the most striking is that of a minivan that was given by a local Rotary Club to a program named Community House in reward for the latter’s charitable work. At the awards ceremony, the Rotary Club called the gift a “van to transport needy youth” (p. ix). This announcement troubled Community House’s organizers, as they saw the simple fact of evoking the social condition of these young people—whom they refer to simply as “volunteers”—as unacceptably cruel. “If I’d have known,” said one of the organizers, “I wouldn’t have brought my kids at all.” At the heart of empowerment talk lurks an effort to downplay structural inequalities in order to emphasize the opportunities available to those who seek emancipation through participation. Rather than dwell on statistics and the lesser likelihood that blacks and poor people will go to college or avoid jail or drug addiction, empowerment projects never cease, to the contrary, to point out that there are always individuals who pull through.


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Footnotes


[1] C. Biewener, M.-H. Bacqué, “Empowerment, développement et féminisme : entre projet de transformation sociale et néolibéralisme,” in M.-H. Bacqué, Y. Sintomer (eds.), La démocratie participative. Histoire et généalogie, Paris, La découverte, 2011, 82-83.


[2] S. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals. A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, London, Random House, 1971; P. Bachrach, M., Baratz, M., Power and Poverty: Theory and Practice, New York, Oxford University Press, 1970; M.-H., Bacqué, “Empowerment et politiques urbaines aux Etats-Unis ,” Géographie, économie, société, vol. 8, n°1, 2006, 107-125 ; W. A. Ninacs, Empowerment et intervention, Développement de la capacité d’agir et de la solidarité, Laval, Presses de l’Université de Laval, 2008.


[3] Even so, see Camille Hamidi, La société civile dans les cités, Paris, Economica, 2010, who identifies similar phenomena in France.


[4] Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding Politics. How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life, Cambridge University Press, 1998 (which has been translated in French by Camille Hamidi as L’évitement du politique. Comment les Américains produisent l’apathie dans la vie quotidienne, Paris, Economica, 2010, 352 p). See, too, the excellent review on this site by Carole Gayet-Viaud, “Est-il devenu indécent de parler de politique?,” La Vie des idées, 2011.


[5] Even if one can easily imagine that it is simply where she was living at the time…


[6] Cf. Paul Lichterman, Elusive Togetherness. Church Groups Trying to Bridge America’s Divisions, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005 ; see, too, the very stimulating review available on this site by Camille Hamidi, “La culture civique sans le capital social. Styles de groupe, vie associative et civilité ordinaire aux Etats-Unis,” La Vie des idées, 2009.


[7] See Marion Carrel, Catherine Neveu, Jacques Ion (eds.), Les intermittences de la démocratie. Formes d’action et visibilités citoyennes dans la ville, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2009.


[8] On this topic, see Julien Talpin “Ces moments qui façonnent les hommes. Éléments pour une approche pragmatiste de la compétence civique,” Revue française de science politique, 60 (1), 2010, 91-115.


[9] Cf. M. Lamont, M. Fournier (eds.), Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequalities, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1992. See, too, her interview with La Vie des idées


[10] Explicitly in keeping with Goffman, one of the central arguments of Avoiding Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1998) is that discourses vary in accordance with the sites where interactions occur. Whereas in public the ordinary citizens studied by Eliasoph were incapable of discussing politics and systematically spoke on their own behalf, she found that in more private settings, surrounded by people they trusted, they allowed themselves to speak of society at large, to denounce injustice, and to extrapolate from their personal experiences to higher degrees of generality. Civic competence thus appears to be not only a question of individual or collective dispositions, but also a function of sites of interaction.


[11] James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, Yale University Press, 1992.


[12] See Julien Talpin, Schools of Democracy. How Ordinary Citizens (Sometimes) Become Competent in Participatory Budgeting Institutions, Colchester, ECPR Press, 2011.


[13] See Thierry Quinqueton, Que ferait Saul Alinsky?, Paris Ed. Desclée de Brouwer, 2011. On the continuation of this tradition in Great Britain through the organization London Citizens, see the work of Hélène Balazard. Balazard H., and Genestier P., 2009, “La notion d’empowerment : un analyseur des tensions idéologiques britanniques et des tâtonnements philosophiques français,” Séminaire ‘Politisations comparées : Sociétés Musulmanes et ailleurs.’ Séance 2 : Empowerment et Politisation : Politisation par le haut et politisation par le bas, EHESS Paris, December 14, 2009.


[14] Marion Gret, Yves Sintomer, Porto Alegre : l’espoir d’une autre démocratie, Paris, La Découverte, 2002 ; Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Militants and Citizens: the Politics of Participatory Democracy in Porto Alegre, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005.


[15] An annex is devoted to On Justification and the work of Laurent Thévenot, Luc Boltanski, Daniel Céfaï and their colleagues is discussed throughout the book. Over the past decade, Eliasoph has developed close ties with French social science and has frequently attended conferences and seminars in France, her work having received a particularly enthusiastic welcome there.


[16] See Luc Boltanski, De la Critique. Précis de sociologie de l’émancipation, Paris, Gallimard, 2009 ; Cyril Lemieux, Le devoir et la grace, Paris, Economica, 2009, notably chapters 7 and 8 on the place of critique which, while it should be secondary, must nonetheless not be absent even from an analysis that seeks to follow participants in their interactions.] by attempting to further integrate power relations and inequalities into her thought. Yet the question of power is rarely raised in her book. Yes, we understand that her participants subtly avoid it, but Eliashoph could have raised it by questioning her choice to study these particular cases. Should we really be surprised, in the end, that the empowerment of participants is impossible in spaces that are themselves powerless—the charitable organizations she studies do not contribute as such to changing the conditions of marginalized groups and individuals—and which do not question power relations in contemporary society? Even if these organizations had political discussions and articulated public critiques, as the author admonishes them to do, the condition of the participants would probably change little. For critique to become the infra-political foundation of revolt rather than a safety valve, one must inquire into the social conditions that make possible the transition from critique to collective action. Only then can, “[u]nder the appropriate conditions, the accumulation of petty acts […], rather like snowflakes on a steep mountainside, set off an avalanche.” [[J. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 192.


Julien Talpin, « Participating Is Not Enough. Civic Engagement and Personal Change », La Vie des idées, 5 January 2012. ISSN : 2105-3030. URL : http://www.booksandideas.net/Participating-Is-Not-Enough.html

Et si on faisait simple? Simplicité volontaire... pour l'État aussi. Downshifting for all...