Does Empowerment Empower?

With ‘empowerment’ we have an example of a well-established though little used word which has been taken up and given new currency by writers on management. Exactly what it means within that context is difficult to say. As with other management buzz-words, the concept associated with it has become a commodity: something sold to management practitioners via bullet-pointed paperbacks telling them ‘how to do it’. As with any other commodity, these buzz-word concepts have to be constantly re-packaged to keep demand buoyant. Usually this takes the form of intensification. Thus, ‘quality’ becomes ‘total quality’, and ‘customer satisfaction’ becomes ‘customer delight’. (The first books on ‘absolute total quality’ and `customer ecstasy’ cannot be far off.) The ultimate intensifier is to append ‘beyond’ to the buzz-word, resulting in, for example, Beyond Total Quality Management (Bound, 1994; McHugh et al., 1993). Alternatively, the re-packaging takes the form of qualificatory disclaimers and we are told what, contrary to popular misconceptions, the thing is not. (We are told, for example, that ‘participative management’ is not ‘organisational democracy’ (Plunkett and Fournier, 1991, p. 18). Such can be the scale and contradictoriness of the disclaimers that we might sometimes be left wondering what exactly the thing is, or even whether it has been qualified out of existence.