Between Emancipatory Practice and Disciplinary Interventions: Empowerment and Contemporary Social Normativity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the last decades, empowerment has become one of the defining concepts of twenty-first-century social work practice. Many studies have set out to show its benefits, highlighting a positive view of individuals and their ability to instigate sustainable change in their life and/or community. The concept, however, has been more often praised than it has been critiqued. This article aims to add to critical works on empowerment in analysing its implications from the point of view of contemporary social normativity, informed by the works of Ehrenberg (2010), Rose (1996) and Foucault (1979). In this perspective, we suggest that the ever-present injunctions to autonomy and individual responsibility can serve simultaneously as a goal and as means to empowerment-centred interventions. The line between emancipatory practices and discipline can thus be thin. By postulating that social work extends beyond inter-individual interactions, the relationship between individuals and normative injunctions becomes a highly interesting subject of study that would prove fruitful in future empirical studies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.044 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.161 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.019 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".