Corporate Social Workor ‘Being’ Empoweredand ‘Doing’ Empowerment:Preface to a DiscourseEthical Monitoring ofthe Capability Approach

Abstract

Is there a corporate social work? Do business corporations as a part of their ‘social responsibility’ aimto socially empower the community by enhancing their basic ‘capability’ registers? While the newlyacquired critical conscience has made social work ethics self-reflexive and thus interrogative about alot 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 effectsof power are lost in the blood of positive nonchalance that seems to promise the granting of powerto the people people’s empowerment)—as if. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) leading to socialempowerment which we term as—Corporate Social Work (CSW)—thus is affirmed in more ways thanone. This article—instead of an external (typical of the radical) disavowal—offers through a theoreticaland an empirical problematic—an internal unpacking of the concept metaphor ‘empowerment’—where‘empowerment’, ‘doing empowerment’ and ‘being empowered’ are demonstrated to be completelyseparate registers awaiting an ethical reckoning. Having completed this separation—however, the articleproposes a discourse ethical monitoring of the capability approach where empowerment participatesonly as a (‘three-way’) fractured phrase in dispute.