Servants of Empowerment

The United Nations defines poverty as poverties of opportunity, including being denied access to good health, education, and decent work. Freedoms like these imply good health and educational services, staffed by motivated workers, and industries that are socially responsible toward their employees and the communities in which they operate. A psychology that is anti-poverty must therefore by definition include the empowerment of individuals in work, for health and in education. It must also connect with policy-makers and communities — contributing to the science of implementation. This chapter articulates a Humanitarian work psychology of empowerment. Research must speak “truth to power,” naming, shaming, and issuing challenges to extant development inequities: A continuing “economic apartheid” in aid workers’ wages; “brain waste” through employment discrimination against skilled (and relatively unskilled) migrants; transforming corporate social responsibility from image management to community empowerment; “task-shifting” health-care delivery from ensconced imported health professionals to local mid-level cadres; and influencing policy development and planning on social inclusion, for people living with disability. These cross-contextual cases also show how organizations can be more effective “capacitors” for human development. Taking empowerment seriously requires that industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology, just like organizations themselves, become a servant of empowerment.