ORGANIZATIONS:
AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL
The Disempowering Logic of
Empowerment
David Collins
Introduction
In common with a whole host of “hot”
management topics – continuous improvement,
total quality and flexibility – no one is against
empowerment. In many ways, opposition to
empowerment could be construed as the height
of professional and indeed social folly.
However, the debate over topics such as
empowerment is cast in dualistic terms. In
everyday speech, dualistic couplets explaining
topics such as empowerment fall naturally
together. The problem being that one half of
the couplet occupies a legitimized and morally
superior position to its less privileged
counterpart. Thus empowerment is a “good”,
disempowerment a “bad”. Continuous
improvement is a “good”, non-improvement a
“bad”.
Of course it is not only the field of
management which throws up and
simultaneously suffers from such dualism.
Tony Berry[1] reviewing a book on critical
theory notes:
Stealing the word “critical” and using it only to
apply to critical theory is one of those
wonderfully extravagant gestures that is
essentially hegemonic in nature. What it appears
to do is lay a grand claim that only this approach
has any critical content and therefore, in one of
its episodes of silence, ensures that there is a
suggestion that all other discourse is essentially
uncritical (p. 279).
With one eye on my professional and social
standing, therefore, this article will not seek to
Empowerment in Organizations, Vol. 2 No. 2, 1994, pp. 14-21
© MCB University Press, 0968-4891
14
argue against the concept of empowerment per
se. Instead it will investigate the logic
underlying empowerment in work
organizations as a means to legitimize a critical
appraisal of empowerment in such settings.
Analyzing the changing contours and nature of
worker involvement and participation, it will
be argued that, far from heralding a new era in
which workers are extensively involved in a
range of business and management matters, the
current focus on empowerment is underpinned
by a logic of disempowerment.
Empowerment
Empowerment is generally acknowledged as
being related to the attitudes and beliefs of
individuals, both singly and as members of
groups (see, for example, the contributions to
the inaugural issue of Empowerment)[2]. When
states of empowerment are described, these
states are often closely tied to attributes such as
confidence and motivation. In terms of
developing feelings of empowerment within
individuals and groups, a key role is accorded
to positive social experiences and situations
which allow for personal growth. In some
sense, then, empowerment is viewed as a social
phenomenon which is related to learned
patterns of behavior. How workers develop or
lose the feeling of empowerment, and what
managers can do about this, has become a key
I am indebted to Syd Weston for perceptive and
constructive comments on an earlier draft of this
article.
 VOLUME 2 NUMBER 2
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issue. Here much attention has been devoted to
providing appropriate social situations which
allow worker participation such that feelings of
empowerment may develop.
An analysis of worker involvement and
participation, therefore, represents a useful
lever into the discussion of empowerment. In
many ways participation and empowerment are
natural corollaries. Pateman[3], for example,
discussing participation, notes that effective
grass-roots participation in political structures,
requires a feeling of political efficacy on the
part of those involved. In short, effective
participation requires a feeling of
empowerment and vice versa.
Setting the discussion of empowerment
within the context of debates on participation
also helps to establish continuities in debate
which can, all too readily, be overlooked when
the subject under discussion is change. Rather
than mystify the development of
empowerment, it is important to understand
and trace the growing interest in such
innovations. Unless we do this, empowerment
will be viewed simply as a new managerial
panacea conjured up by consultants and
academics, entirely divorced from previous
periods and the experiences of those whose
role it will be to implement such suggestions. It
is important, therefore, both from a practical
and an academic point of view, to set the
debate in terms of long-run and ongoing issues
and problems which characterize the
employment relationship. Thus, while the idea
of empowerment is, indeed, a seductive one,
we must not let optimism for, and commitment
to such an idea color our views unduly. If we
let our enthusiasm run away with us, we will
lose sight of the factors that promote
managerial interest and we also run the risk of
overlooking the factors which make
empowered states problematic to achieve.
Instead of assuming that we can create the
world anew we must, when analyzing changes
such as this, always have an understanding of
the ways in which the context of change may
alternately promote and hinder our endeavors.
15
As noted above, an analysis of participation
and involvement can provide this much-needed
perspective.
The Need for Involvement
Any discussion of involvement must
acknowledge that employee involvement is not
the simple product of a new enlightened era of
empowerment. Instead it is properly viewed as
a core aspect of work organizations. This, of
course, does not mean that formal structures
for employee involvement exist in all firms.
We should note, however, that historically
speaking such structures do have a long
pedigree. Employee involvement in work is
central to the processes of work organization in
a capitalist society and can take place without
the requirement for such formal structures. It is
equally true, however, that in recent years
employee involvement has become something
which managers have tried to solicit from their
workers with increased vigor.
Traditionally managers looked to the
employment contract to specify and ensure that
workers performed as required. The rights of
owners and managers to direct and discipline
workers were enshrined in property rights
which such contracts sought to protect.
However, obvious limits to this simple
contractual view of management and
organization tended to limit the efficacy of
such an approach. For output to be realized,
workers must always go beyond what can be
specified contractually. Indeterminacy,
therefore, is at the heart of any contract of
employment.
Contracts of employment are drawn up to
cover general events and circumstances and
thus there will always be aspects of work
which the contract cannot cover and cannot
enforce. As Bendix[4] notes:
Beyond what commands can effect and
supervision can control, beyond what incentives
can induce and penalties prevent, there exists an
exercise of discretion important even in
relatively menial jobs, which managers of
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economic enterprises seek to enlist for the
achievement of managerial ends (p. 256).
Clearly, then, there is a need for some form of
involvement on the part of workers. Without
some feeling of involvement, whether it be
based on professionalism, emotional
attachment or some other set of factors, the
plain facts are that work would simply not be
done on time, or to the requisite quality.
Indeed, perhaps not done at all. As MacInnes
[5] notes:
Management, no matter how expert, cannot set
out in advance exactly what must be done under
all circumstances and how, but must rely to
some extent on the workers’ co-operation,
initiative and experience (p. 130).
Indeed historical studies[6,7] have served to
remind us that, in having the ability to perform
their work tasks, all workers are empowered to
some degree. However, arguments for looking
more closely at continuities do not mean that
there is never anything new. Clearly arguments
that build from an understanding of the role of
continuities through change must always
acknowledge the specifics of the present.
However, in order to do this properly, we must
understand the perennial issues which surround
participation and involvement at work. In the
following sections the problems both of
analyzing worker involvement and of
managerial interest in involvement and
participation will be examined.
The Ambiguity of Involvement
A key problem is encountered as soon as we
seek to analyze employee involvement in
work. The problem is basically one of the
elasticity of such a concept or, as Cressey and
MacInnes[8] might put it, a problem of
semantics partly intertwined with expressions
of a range of political and academic
viewpoints. Not only does the term
involvement carry different implications for
those subject to it at work, it also carries widely
different connotations for a range of academic
16
commentators and business gurus. Thus the
fact that all parties in industry may agree on the
worth of employee involvement may do little
more than prove the semantic elasticity of the
term. For example, Wickens[9] claims:
We seek to delegate and revolve staff in
discussion and decision making, particularly in
those areas in which they can effectively
contribute so that all may participate in the
effective running of NMUK (p. 82).
However, the above statement is clearly open
to debate as to what counts as effective
contribution, appropriate participation and the
effective running of a large-scale organization
such as NMUK. Anyone pretending otherwise
would be engaged in self-delusion. Indeed, this
debate is acknowledged, implicitly, in the
complex of methods used to engage and
involve workers in NMUK. As Blyton and
Turnbull[10] note, Nissan’s emphasis on
“quality, flexibility and teamwork” could just
as easily be read as “control, exploitation and
surveillance”.
As an attempt to pierce such semantic
confusion it is useful to try to distinguish,
analytically, between different types of
employee involvement. At a basic level, then,
it is useful to distinguish direct versus indirect
involvement.
Direct employee involvement includes those
initiatives which focus explicitly on the
individual worker and the immediate work
group. Thus the direct forms include a limited
delegation of areas of responsibility, previously
guarded as managerial, through the redesign of
the organization of work. This type of
involvement would also include an increase in
certain worker responsibilities as these relate to
production. Thus the creation of semi-
autonomous work groups and devolved worker
responsibility for quality would be included
here.
Indirect forms of employee involvement are
concerned with areas of decision making which
have more of a policy character. Ostensibly the
function of this form of involvement is more
concerned with worker representation than the
 VOLUME 2 NUMBER 2
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development of functional motivation alone,
although there are argued to be links between
these two. These indirect forms include worker
representation on management boards,
consultative committees and, of course, trade
union collective bargaining. However, what
such a dichotomy still fails to grasp is the
fluidity of the terms involvement, consultation
and participation.
Collective bargaining, quality circles, quality
task forces, autonomous work groups and
worker participation, are all forms of shorthand
for the over-arching concept of employee
involvement. The problem being that each
covers a wide range of ideas and a variety of
potentials for the outcomes of employee
involvement. A continuum may be used to
express the fluidity of the concept as a whole.
Logically this continuum would, at one polar
extreme, be concerned with joint decision
making, while at the other extreme there would
be no formal employee involvement beyond
that which would be minimally required to
achieve some basic level of output. In essence
this continuum turns on the extent to which the
balance of power in the enterprise is altered by
the type of employee involvement in operation.
To illustrate this we might postulate that at
the low employee involvement pole of the
continuum we would find forms of
management such as Taylor’s Scientific
Management. In Taylorist management
systems, employee involvement is
systematically removed from production
systems in attempts to design work
scientifically and so boost output. Here,
workers are not so much involved in the
production and management systems, as
One-way
information Joint decision
exchange making
No form of
employee
Joint
consultation
Worker
control
involvement
catered for
Figure 1.
A Logical Continuum of Employee Involvement
and Participation
17
engaged through the carrot of high wage
rewards. The other end of the continuum is
probably more of a logical extreme than the
low involvement pole, since this seems to
imply some fully developed form of industrial
democracy or workers’ soviet.
Employee involvement, then, is a broad term
which covers an extremely broad range of
concepts of which any developed analysis of
involvement would have to take note.
Unfortunately few accounts of involvement
within mainstream analyses of management, or
of the analysis of change within organizations,
exhibit this reflective quality. Instead a small
range of academic viewpoints is dominant.
Part of the problem for the analysis of
employee involvement is the extent to which
the dominant accounts are written from an
implicit ideological perspective which is never
made explicit. Indeed, the choice of the term,
employee involvement, in contemporary
debate, could be viewed as a betrayal of a
particular type of thinking which has political
implications, both organizationally and
academically. Different subject disciplines tend
to adopt different terms to discuss related
concepts. The choice of these terms is not
random. Instead the terms chosen denote
different agendas and point toward different
problematics. Industrial relations, for example,
would tend to view employee involvement as a
sub-set of a larger discussion of worker
participation.
Within the boundaries of industrial relations,
many writers would be dismissive of the term
involvement[11,12], viewing it as an
unnecessarily restrictive initiative designed to
give only the illusion of some more extensive
form of participation. Indeed, from this
perspective the term employee involvement
might even be viewed as an attempt to restrict
the debate and in effect, erase the rightward
extremes of the continuum, since the term
involvement seems to deny any more extensive
input from workers to decision-making
processes. On this basis employee involvement
fails Pateman’s test for genuine participation as
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offering participation in the formulation of
strategy and decisions rather than being
involved only in their execution[3].
It is also interesting to note, over the course
of the last decade or two, how the vocabulary
of this debate has changed as a particular group
of commentators and problematics has come
centre stage. In the late 1970s the debate was
conducted in terms of democracy and social
justice and was assumed to operate in an arena
of collective representation. In short, effective
worker participation, and so, effective worker
involvement in production related decisions,
was assumed to take place through trade union
representation of worker interests.
Over time, however, the debate has been
recast, moving from collective representation
towards a focus on individuals, the transfer of
information and a range of related initiatives
such as financial participation. Increasingly,
involvement has come to mean some restricted
form of information exchange by which
managers communicate directly with workers
in order to smooth the path to some form of
change or development within the
organization. As was mentioned above, and as
the following sections will demonstrate, such
changes in the terms of the debate are
illuminating and deserve discussion. Rather
than present this current form of involvement
as part of the natural order of things, as the
members of this now dominant grouping of
commentators do, we need to investigate why
such changes and adaptations have come about
and why changes, ostensibly toward
empowerment, are sought.
The problem, then, with mainstream and
currently popular accounts of worker
involvement is that these accounts are
conducted almost exclusively within an
historical and unitary frame of reference to the
exclusion of other debates and forms of
theoretical and, indeed, historical input. One
way to critique the involvement philosophies
popularized by management writers and those
concerned with empowerment, therefore, is to
attack the rhetoric of involvement and
18
participation and, from this, examine the
respective roles of managers and workers.
Here, as Ramsay and Beirne[13] demonstrate,
what is often termed participation, with
connotations of extensive involvement and
representation, most often equates only with
some highly restricted form of involvement
located toward the left pole of our continuum.
Here the function of “participation”, as far as
management is concerned, is to ensure a level
of output at the requisite level of quality. This
is perfectly understandable, but we must realize
that it circumscribes what is to be achieved
through participation. From this perspective the
function of “participation” seems to be
legitimation of a managerially controlled
agenda, not the representation of worker
interest within a fuller debate. The concern
which surely must be raised is, can the
experience of such involvement in practice (as
distinct from in rhetoric), build confidence, can
it provide appropriate situations for personal
growth, in short, can such “participation” really
be empowering?
Involvement and Participation in
Context
The growing use of the term and the increasing
number of journal articles on the subject of
empowerment is testament to the fact that
some form of change must have taken place,
otherwise we should still be discussing the
merits of participation as distinct from
empowerment. At face value the record of
involvement in the 1980s does sound different
and remarkably like empowerment.
Throughout the 1980s managers have
apparently turned to embrace involvement and
participation with renewed vigor. As managers
have done this during a period when clear
attacks on managerial prerogative appear to be
absent, we might be tempted to bid a fond
farewell to the 1970s and the conflict-oriented
views of writers such as Ramsay[14]. We
might be tempted to say that, in the 1980s,
visions of the divided nature of work
 VOLUME 2 NUMBER 2
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organizations became redundant as managers
dropped the idea of controlling and restraining
workers and, instead, worked to find ways to
release talent and energy. Perhaps, then, the
1980s represent one of those historical
watersheds favored by historians in their
analyses.
Indeed there is a range of indicators which
mark the 1980s off from the preceding decade.
Here we might include the sharp rise in
unemployment, the decline of trade unions and
the renewed focus on managers and enterprise
more generally. We might, then, be tempted to
say that advances in management education
and changes in the character of society itself
have altered the world of work and allowed
more sophisticated and realistic work relations
to flourish. But in truth this particular analysis
of change and worker involvement does not
constitute the knockout punch to Ramsay
which a casual first reading might lead us to
believe. Neither does it lend support to the idea
of a developing interest in empowerment in
any simple or unproblematic way.
To some considerable degree the arguments
for empowerment seem to rest on sophistry and
semantic confusion over the issues of power
and control and how these can be realized. The
growth of certain types of direct participation
in an era of apparently low worker power does
not negate Ramsay’s cycles-of-control
argument.
Thus if Ramsay’s focus on control is so wide
of the mark, we must ask just why did
managers rekindle their interest in participation
post-1979 and why has empowerment come
center stage? The truth is that while we might
accord some role to factors such as increasing
levels of managerial education as promoting
interest in participation, control remains at the
heart of this managerial interest. The growing
significance of product markets and
competition in periods of relative labor
harmony, as in the 1980s, calls for
management control just as surely as labor
unrest would.
19
What is termed empowerment, therefore,
equates only to involvement and job
participation, since workers lack any voice in
the formulation or development of policy
matters or strategic concern. In the 1970s
attempts were made to develop such worker
inputs to decision making by fostering
representative participation, but the 1980s have
represented a retreat from such ideas. Instead
of participating generally in managerial
decisions, workers are now offered
involvement only in a narrow way. In this
sense what has come to be viewed as the
decade of empowerment has actually been
based on declining levels of worker influence.
Management control has not been rolled back.
If anything it has been reconfigured and
reasserted and, but for one caveat which will be
addressed below, the arguments for
empowerment as a fact of organizational life
lie in tatters.
The arguments for the persistence of, and
indeed, increase in control, do not necessarily
close the debate on empowerment and its
underlying logic. One increasingly favored
argument could be raised in defense. The
argument runs like this. If the 1970s still color
the issues of the 1990s to some considerable
degree, can we not do what many managers
have been exhorted to do; refuse to accept the
status quo and change culture to allow
empowerment to flourish?
Recently the argument over involvement and
participation in industrial relations has lurched
forward in this direction. The prospect of an
altogether new era in involvement and so the
emergence of empowerment as a new
departure point for the management of
organizations is one of the supposed benefits of
changing the culture of organizations. If true,
such an argument could make Ramsay’s ideas
of stunted or pseudo-participation redundant
since, in these new cultures, commitment is
viewed as replacing control and empowerment
replaces the need for discipline and
surveillance.
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A New Era in Involvement?
It has been argued that the current and surely
continuing interest in total quality management
(TQM) could foster a new era in involvement
which, unlike earlier forms, could be
characterized by greater longevity. The record
of quality circles in improving the level and
quality of output is mixed. In management
terms such initiatives produce good results for
short periods, but, in the UK context at least,
such initiatives seem to break down within a
few years. TQM, it is argued, represents a
subtly different approach to management and
involvement and so could represent a more
sustainable form of employee involvement.
Hill[15] argues that TQM represents, to
some degree, a culture change in work where
managers as well as workers share the blame
for poor quality. In essence, Hill argues that
this culture change represents the ability to
harness commitment and may lead to more
long-lasting forms of involvement and so more
extensive two-way contributions. However, we
should not be too ready to accept the fact of
cultural change at work as an altogether new
departure from the past. Thus we would have
to acknowledge that in work organizations
“commitment”, a cornerstone of
empowerment, implies not the absence of
control, but a range of other ways of ensuring
and implementing control. Hill’s argument for
a new era in involvement, therefore, argues not
for the end of control and the birth of
commitment, but the complex management of
control and commitment or, if you will, the
control of commitment.
There is no reason to believe, therefore, that
culture change would be built on the
generalized empowerment of workers and the
redundancy of control mechanisms. Indeed, in
support of the arguments of this paper, critical
accounts of culture change tend to support the
idea that the management of culture within
work organizations is an inherently
disempowering process. In spite of the rhetoric
of dynamism and commitment to production,
the role of workers, aside from their direct
20
production interface, is designed to be a
passive acceptance of management goals and
the strong managerial leadership which is said
to be necessary for culture change[16]. We are,
therefore, left with the position that the cultural
changes required for empowerment, and the
involvement strategies designed to facilitate
and reinforce attempts to develop
empowerment and manage culture, are built on
ideas which deny scope for worker
involvement. Models of culture change and
empowerment, therefore, effectively displace
the need for inquiring, confident and self-
sufficient workers, thanks to a focus on strong
managerial leaders and sheep-like followers. In
practice, and indeed in design, empowerment
disempowers.
Conclusions
For some people, the practical relevance of the
preceding discussion may seem obscure. Why
attack and knock down ideas which seek only
to make practical suggestions and contributions
to business enterprises? In the absence of
having something practical and constructive to
add, should academics not remain silent? Such
claims, however, turn on a mistaken notion of
“practical” matters and represent a failure to
examine what, of necessity, underpins
decisions on practical courses of action.
Practical matters cannot be divorced from
theoretical matters. Any practical steps to
address problem issues must be based on a
consideration of the important features of the
problem faced. Theory supplies such insights
into key areas for practical attention. An
explicit analysis of theory, therefore,
illuminates the plurality of ideas, and so, the
problems which surround issues such as
empowerment and participation in practice.
If managers and trade unionists are to take
anything from this article, I hope it will be this.
Long-term trust and success come not from
obscuring issues and attempts to cloak dissent.
Unfortunately this is the outcome of
empowerment strategies in practice since
 VOLUME 2 NUMBER 2
1994
workers are denied any real voice in
organizations. Instead, consensus (which is
really what managers seek through their
interest in empowerment and what the
disempowering logic of empowerment
attempts to guarantee), is far more likely to
emerge and be sustained where there are
structures which allow representation of
interest and not simply information exchange.
In Britain this seems to have been forgotten as
managers increasingly try to bypass trade
unions by building parallel involvement
structures. Recent evidence from Europe,
however, points toward the shortsightedness of
such measures. European human resource
management policies have operated on the
basis of including, not excluding,
representative participation and, while
indicators of success on such matters are
difficult to pin down, the competitive record of
a range of European companies certainly gives
food for thought.
Clearly, then, there is scope for worker
involvement. The quotation from Bendix
shows that this has always been so. However,
there is also room for empowerment – not in
the restricted sense of job participation, which
is driven by a disempowering logic; instead
there is room for empowerment initiatives
which allow and indeed encourage
representative participation.
There is no a priori reason why TQM and
such forms of participation and empowerment
could not be coterminous. If such initiatives are
allowed to flourish, models of culture change
just might become both credible and, perhaps,
more palatable.
n Relations, Vol. 29 No. 4, 1991, pp. 541-68.
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21
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David Collins is Lecturer in Human Resource
Management at Sunderland Business School,
Sunderland, UK.