This is the slide set for Week 2 of the Supporting Community Empowerment MiniMOOC

1. Empowerment, structure
and agency
Dr Lucy Maynard – Research Assistant, Brathay Trust
Kaz Stuart – Head of Research and Evaluation, Brathay Trust

2. Aims of the presentation
• Listen to Gemma’s story
• Introduce a model of empowerment
• Empowerment as collective action
• Understanding structures
• Relating to agency

3. Gemma’s Story
People should be aware that Gemma’s language is at
times colourful and she talks about sexual exploitation.
Gemma is a pseudonym chosen by herself.

5. Maynard (2011)

6. Personal becoming…
• Questioning
• Challenging
• Critical
• Political

7. Collective action
Personal becoming collective
“Collective narratives for change”
(Ledwith, 2011, p.62).

8. Collective action
Autonomy and action gather strength in a
collective process:
“the simple act of listening to people’s
stories, respectfully giving one’s full
attention, is an act of personal
empowerment, but to bring about
change for social justice this process
needs to be collective and needs to be
located within wider structures” (ibid.)

9. Structures
• Micro – our day to day practice
• Meso – organisational and professional
governance and norms
• Macro – National law, policy, and
‘discourses’
• Beneficiary – children, young people and
families

10. Structures are positive and negative
Enabling Constraining
Policy A is fantastic, it means I can…. Policy A is terrible, it means I have
to….
Less resources mean we need to do Less resources mean we don’t have
more together time do anything together
The way people work together is really I have to work with everyone all the
inclusive and I get more out of it time, and it really gets in the way of
doing my job
Please help me out, I am really Don’t think that you can come into this
struggling in how to handle my kids, house telling us what to do,, bloomin’
and know that you might be able to busy body….
help

12. Agency is…..
• “individuals need to be conceptualised as
personally agentic, yet socially shaped over
time.” (Mead, 1913)
• Agency; “implies the ability of individuals or
groups to act on their situations, to behave as
subjects rather than objects in their own lives,
to shape their own circumstances and
ultimately achieve change” (Jeffery, 2011, p.
6)

13. Agency comprises:
• Awareness
• Choice
• Action

14. • “Any reasonably complete theory of human
agency will need, in some way, to advert to
our reflectiveness, our planfulness, and our
conception of agency as temporally
extended” Bratman (2007, p. 22).
• Giddens (1984), Archer (2000), Hay (2004)
are leading contemporary authors who
debate structure and agency.

16. Our ideas….
• Structure pre-exists actions
• Structures influence identity
• Identity influences empowerment
• Empowerment influences agency
• Agency interacts with structures, creating
a new structure
• So empowerment, agency and structures
exist in a cyclical relationship.

17. ???
• How important is our language when we
are discussing ‘empowerment’?
• How can we encourage people to focus on
the enabling aspects of structure, rather
than just the constraints?

18. Key references
Archer, M. (2000) Being Human, the problem of agency. Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press.
Bratman, M. (2007) Structures of Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Freire, P. (1973). Education for a critical consciousness. New York: Seabury
Press.
Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hay, C. (2002) Political Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Jeffery, L. (2011) Understanding Agency. Bristol: Policy Press.
Ledwith, M. (2011). Community development: A critical approach (Second
Edition). Bristol: Policy Press.
Maynard (2011) “Suddenly I See”- Outdoor Youth Development’s Impact on
Young Women’s Well-being: An Empowerment Framework. Unpublished PhD
thesis. University of Cumbria.
Mead, G. (1913) The Social Self. Bobbs Merril Reprint.