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Liberation and regulation? Some paradoxes of empowerment

During the last decade empowerment has emerged as a socially desir able construct and as an organising principle for various forms of personal and social change which focus on exercising the ability to take control of one's life. One notable feature of this development is the appearance of 'empowerment' in a range of views, from the right as well as the left, and its espousal as a quasi-moral principle by a range of fields from human resource management to radical social work. As importantly, while empowerment remains in the domain of those who seek to empower themselves, a new ground has opened-up during this period for professionals, particularly from the fields of health and welfare, who seek to empower others. This paper examines the emergence of empowerment as pro fessional practice and argues that the ubiquitous presence of empower ment in current health and welfare discourses has important regulatory as well as liberatory implications for potential empowerment 'candi dates' and for practitioners, which may jeopardise the possibilities of maintaining a critical meaning for the term.