Empowerment and personal assistance - resistance, consumer choice, partnership or discipline?

Abstract

The concept of empowerment has been closely linked to the development of personal assistance (PA) and the independent living ideology. However, the use of the concept of empowerment has been disputed as it has begun to be used in both the marketization of the PA scheme and as a government strategy to promote active partnership. In this article, we take a closer look at the concept of empowerment and how different approaches capture different relationships between the state and the users of PA. We distinguish between empowerment as a form of resistance, as a form of consumer choice, as co-productions and as a liberal strategy of dominance in the modern society. The analysis indicates how the different notions of empowerment run alongside each other in the development of the PA arrangement in the Scandinavian countries and that the different perspectives will have different consequences when PA is to be analysed as a tool of liberation for disabled people. © 2014 Nordic Network on Disability Research.