Designed to help build powerful community organizations, empower ordinary citizens to become leaders, and bring about major social and economic change, this book offers a coherent practice-based framework for understanding social action, with power and empowerment at the center of analysis. Topics include recruiting members, consensus building, leadership, publicity, and fundraising.

Many people want to help bring about changes in their neighborhoods, workplaces, and communities. Leaders and scholars of change efforts are likewise eager for insights into what makes some organizations and coalitions capable of building and exercising power. Why are some groups successful in making changes in policies and systems and in sustaining their momentum over time, while others struggle or never really get off the ground? With Community Power and Empowerment, Brian D. Christens brings the most comprehensive analysis of empowerment theory yet conducted to bear on these questions, taking aim at many of the longstanding weaknesses and ambiguities of empowerment theory, research, and practice. For example, one major hindrance is that most notions of empowerment have not been coherently connected with community power. In addition, research has emphasized psychological aspects of empowerment over organizational processes, and has neglected community empowerment processes to an even greater extent. By linking empowerment and community power, Christens constructs a holistic framework for assessing and comparing community-driven change efforts. This book offers new guidance for inquiries into outcomes and impacts of empowerment processes on health and well-being, providing a resource for researchers, organizational leaders, practitioners, and anyone interested in collective action for change.

This book uncovers how power operates around the world, and how it can be resisted or transformed through empowered collective action and social leadership. The stakes have never been higher. Recent years have seen a rapid escalation of inequalities, the rise of new global powers and corporate interests, increasing impunity of human rights violations, suppression of civil society, and a re-shaping of democratic processes by post-truth, populist and nationalist politics. Rather than looking at power through the lenses of agency or structure alone, this book views power and empowerment as complex and multidimensional societal processes, defined by pervasive social norms, conditions, constraints and opportunities. Bridging theory and practice, the book explores real-world applications using a selection of frameworks, tools, case studies, examples, resources and reflections from experience to support actors to analyse their positioning and align themselves with progressive social forces. Compiled with social change practitioners, students and scholars in mind, Power, Empowerment and Social Change is the perfect volume for anyone involved in politics, international development, sociology, human rights and environmental justice who is looking for fresh insights for transforming power in favour of relatively less powerful people.

Empowerment has become a well-used term across a wide variety of social work settings that involve dealing with people and their problems. But is it a central part of good practice or an empty word? And what of power? It is a central theme of human services practice but, like empowerment, is often only loosely examined. This book examines both the theory and practice of power and empowerment.

"Security Based Approach to Development" (SBA) is a new vision to development by addressing security and development issues simultaneously. It merges the global security issues with the "Rights Based" and "Needs Based" approaches. The book provides an in-depth analysis of Identity and Power. In today's context identity and security issues are two sides of the coin. SBA has recognized the issue of 'personal identification' as a pre-requisite to empowerment. Analysis attributes the deteriorating law-and-order, rigged elections, corruption, socioeconomic disparity, harboring of terrorists, lack of transparency and poor governance to lack of personal identification systems. The book stresses that unless the development investments and insecurity issues are addressed simultaneously the global development agenda will be further delayed.

The near-ubiquitous spread of ICT offers unprecedented opportunities for social and economic agents, reshapes social and economic structures and drives the emergence of socioeconomic networks. This book contributes to the growing body of literature and present state of knowledge, offering the reader broad evidence on how new information and communication technologies impact women’s economic and social empowerment and hence have an impact on overall welfare creation. More specifically, it concentrates on demonstrating how ICT may become "empowering technologies" through their implementation. The book is designed to provide deep insight into the theoretical and empirical evidence on ICT as a significant driver of women`s social and economic development. Special focus is given to examining the following broad topics: channels of ICT impact on women's development; the role of ICT in enhancing women's active participation in formal labor markets; examples of how ICT encourages education, skills development, institutions development et alia, and thus contributes to women’s social and economic empowerment, as well as case-based evidence on ICT's role in fostering women’s equality. The primary audience for the book will be scholars and academic professionals from a wide variety of disciplines but mainly those who are concerned with addressing the issues of economic development and growth, social development, the role of technology progress in the context of broadly defined socioeconomic progress. Chapters 1 and 3 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Peter Morriss discusses the notion of 'power' and attempts to show how recent accounts of power have misinterpreted crucial components, thereby producing faulty analyses. He puts the study of power into a modern context and also explains why an understanding of power is so important in developing a radical critique of a society. The revised second edition includes a new foreword.