Corporate Social Workor ‘Being’ Empowered and ‘Doing’ Empowerment: Preface to a Discourse Ethical Monitoring of the Capability Approach

Abstract

Is there a corporate social work? Do business corporations as a part of their ‘social responsibility’ aim to socially empower the community by enhancing their basic ‘capability’ registers? While the newly acquired critical conscience has made social work ethics self-reflexive and thus interrogative about a lot of concept-metaphors taken for granted in traditional social work discourse, the language of ‘empowerment’ seems to have still bullied this apocalyptic, experimental eye. All the negative effects of power are lost in the blood of positive nonchalance that seems to promise the granting of power to the people people’s empowerment)—as if. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) leading to social empowerment which we term as—Corporate Social Work (CSW)—thus is affirmed in more ways than one. This article—instead of an external (typical of the radical) disavowal—offers through a theoretical and an empirical problematic—an internal unpacking of the concept metaphor ‘empowerment’—where ‘empowerment’, ‘doing empowerment’ and ‘being empowered’ are demonstrated to be completely separate registers awaiting an ethical reckoning. Having completed this separation—however, the article proposes a discourse ethical monitoring of the capability approach where empowerment participates only as a (’three-way’) fractured phrase in dispute.