Social Role Valorization and, or versus, "empowerment".

03Original abstract

One sociopolitical ideology that in the last 2 decades or so has been on the rise in the service and advocacy culture is that of conveying to bodily or functionally impaired people, and to members of other societally devalued classes, power (as expressed in "empowerment" language), self-determination, and choice (as in "freedom of choice" language), even to the point of unbridled license to do whatever they want. Sometimes, this strategy is specifically alleged to be a superior or preferable alternative to Social Role Valorization (e.g., Branson & Miller, 1992; Chappell, 1992; Perrin & Nirje, 1985). Some people have also claimed (e.g., Nirje, 1992; Perrin & Nirje, 1985) that the original formulation of the normalization principle had been all about rights and empowerment, and that this emphasis has been ignored, left out, or overridden by later formulations of the principle by Wolfensberger and colleagues (e.g., Wolfensberger, 1972; Wolfensberger & Glenn, 1973a, 1973b, 1975a, 1975b), and possibly by others, and by its reconceptualization as Social Role Valorization (e.g., Wolfensberger, 1983, 1991, 1992, 1998, 2000), all of which these critics consider faulty. However, such claims constitute a historical revisionism, because early formulations of normalization (e.g., Nirje, 1969; Wolfensberger, 1972) were only partially concerned with rights, and although the power idiom and thinking began to infiltrate from the political arena into the human service and advocacy culture in the 1970s, it did not become commonplace there until the late 1980s.Once the empowerment construct and idiom became popular, it was applied not only to traditional ways of discoursing about power, but to almost anything. Perceiving the appeal of a power construct and idiom, people began to incorporate it indiscriminately and almost everywhere, and issues that once would have been framed in very different terms began to be widely framed as issues of power. Even issues of competence are now commonly framed this way. In my files I have documentation of the following things (among many more) now being taught or interpreted as empowerment: meditation classes, personal planning, teaching about AIDS, good nursing, acquiring pistols, using condoms, building gambling casinos, praying, learning casework skills, beefing up a university's academic program, helping children do homework, teaching virtually any skill, being a caregiver, becoming more sexy, giving someone hospitality, kicking one's unruly child out of the home, practicing polygamy, putting children under guardianship, learning to read, playing "hard to get" with members of the opposite sex, being optimistic, home drug-testing of children by their parents, self-actualization, not being dependent on others, giving people computers or acquiring computers, getting on the Internet, dumping service clients, character education, not becoming anorexic, getting psychotherapy, enrolling in bibliotherapy, giving children "art therapy," learning English, rehabilitating imprisoned felons, buying a computerized study Bible, "searching for the historical Jesus," engaging in Christian ministry, being allowed to be present at the sentencing of a criminal who had done one harm, making more money, doing a solo in an orchestra, receiving rehabilitation after brain injury, starring in a play, improving product design, doing research, eschewing professionalism, and committing suicide. One entire conference was devoted to how to "empower" people who had to live in an institution for 1,200. Obviously, a term or construct that can mean anything eventually will mean nothing.Confronted with the vast popularity of the self-determination and power ideology in recent years, some parties sympathetic to Social Role Valorization (SRV) have claimed, implied, or assumed that SRV is congruent with this ideology, and perhaps even that "empowerment" and self-determination are or should be the ultimate goal of SRV. However, even if one discounts most of the shallow and silly interpretations of empowerment, and conceptualizes power in more conventional ways, there are a number of important differences between SRV and ideologies of empowerment that will now be explained.The empowerment ideology relies a great deal on coercion, and/or a conflict model. One gives people powers to compel other people to do something, or not to do something. In contrast, SRV relies largely on educational and persuasive strategies that change people's mind content about certain classes of other people by changing their perceptions, expectations, and attitudes.One thing that all the ideologies of power, autonomy, and choice have in common is that they are based on de facto religion (i.e., on ideas of what "should" be), rather than on science which—at best—can describe what is and predict what will be.Because people's minds tend to get scrambled the moment they hear the word religion, it is very important to understand what I do and do not mean by it. I mean the term to be understood the way many philosophers of science and epistemologists do, namely, as any supra-empirical or extraempirical belief or belief system, or worldview. Accordingly, capitalism, communism, fascism, democracy, the hope that science or technology will save the world, and thousands of other beliefs are religions, including belief systems that have been formally defined as religions, such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, ancestor worship, voodoo, and so on. In fact, epistemologists have made the convincing point that even atheism is a religion, as much as theism or deism, because it too is based on an assertion that can never be empirically disproven by appeal to the laws of nature. Insofar as every person capable of some thought holds to beliefs that are not empirically falsifiable, each such person has a religion—in fact, many people incoherently have several religions which, rather embarrassingly, are usually mutually exclusive.While in the above sense, then, ideologies of autonomy, empowerment, and self-determination are de facto religions, SRV is an empiricism-based body of theory (actually, an amalgam of multiple theories) that can describe, explain, and predict phenomena, but that does not prescribe, even though SRV was created with the hope that it would be used as a basis for role-valorizing actions. For instance, like all moral "shoulds," statements as to how much power anyone should have, or which rights should be given to or withheld from which people, must come from the supra-empirical level, and thus from above SRV. However, SRV can only inform us—actually or potentially—on an empirical basis how the restricting or according of power, autonomy, and rights is likely to impact on people's social image, their competence, their roles, and how others will perceive them and relate to them. The reason this kind of information is crucially important to SRV implementation is that, as I explained in this journal (Wolfensberger, 2000), within the SRV framework, imagery and competency are seen as the two major strategies for attaining valued social roles, and SRV posits that people in valued social roles are apt to be accorded the good things in life, while people in societally devalued roles are apt to get mistreated. Because these assertions by SRV are within the realm of empirical falsifiability, they are in the domain of science.Both Nirje's (1969) and Wolfensberger's (1972) formulations of normalization did promote normative autonomy and rights for people, but this is no longer true of SRV. The reason is that although normalization was a mixture of ideology and empirical social science, SRV aspires to base its claims entirely on empiricism and on social science—though at a high and overarching level—that inform one what will happen to people if one does this or that, what will happen if one does not, and what may have happened in the first place to bring about certain situations that one may want to change (Wolfensberger, 1995, 1998, 2000).Also, because SRV aspires to be no more than an action scheme based on social science, it cannot inform people whether they should or should not value all, some, or no humans, but it can give very powerful rules as to what one would have to do if one wanted people to occupy social roles that are valued by others (Wolfensberger, 1995). Also, SRV posits that people will be vastly more likely to become valued as persons by those others who perceive them to occupy valued social roles. Note, however, that although SRV can speak of valuing people or humans, it cannot speak of valuing persons if by "persons" is meant anything other than human beings. The reason this bears saying is that persons have traditionally been defined in philosophical, ethical, legal, or programmatic terms that are derived from de facto (even if not explicated) religious (i.e., supra-empirical) beliefs, and often coincided with definitions of humanhood. More recent definitions of personhood, however, are often no longer synonymous with traditional scientific definitions of humanhood.One of the big differences between SRV and the self-determination and power theories, strategies, or paradigms really boils down to how any of these would answer the following question: Are people more likely to get the good things of life by occupying social roles that are valued by others (which presumably will also be translated into more general social valuation), or by the exercise of power, autonomy, and self-determination in and over their lives, and of power over, or vis-à-vis, other people? Social Role Valorization proposes the former, the empowerment ideology seems to propose the latter. The power ideology appears to claim that having or not having power not only determines how one will be treated, but also whether one will get the good things of life. But the SRV literature and its oral teaching culture propose that, in the end, what ultimately determines how a person or group will be treated, and what others will afford to such a party in life, is what is in the minds of those who do the treating and affording, and, most specifically, whether and to what degree they perceive the party in valued social roles. Usually, the "they" consists of the majority of society; sometimes, "they" may be only its ruling minority, or the members of a societal subculture of close relevance to the party at issue.For its position, SRV can cite much evidence that people will be granted by others the good things of life to the degree that (a) they occupy valued roles and/or are more generally valued, and (b) those others have it in their power to grant the good things at issue. In regard to the latter, one should note that human collectivities sometimes are in such extreme straits that they have little to offer to even their most valued members other than positive regard. But putting aside such extreme situations for the moment, both history and knowledge of human nature inform us that people can be—and often have been—valued, protected, and freely afforded a good life, even though they are/were totally powerless, especially in the material sense in which the empowerment cultus usually employs the term power (e.g., Branson & Miller, 1992; Brown & Smith, 1989; Chappell, 1992). Conversely, people who have a great deal of power to do and get what they want are not necessarily highly valued, even many of their roles that carry power may not be valued, and they may not be freely accorded all sorts of good things by many other people, even though there may be certain good things that powerful persons may be able to procure for themselves, or wrest away from others by means of power, though usually only if they are quite competent people. Under extreme conditions especially, this wresting can be of a Nietzschean nature, where raw power is exercised by the stronger over the weaker in disregard of any legal or moral law, as we have seen in recent civil and international wars—and there are always stronger and weaker parties. No religious, social, psychological, political, or economic cultus has ever succeeded in equalizing power between stronger and weaker parties, only in reshuffling who is stronger versus who is weaker. Any claims that some scheme some day will achieve equalization is utopian, and if it were not, it would probably be maladaptive and undesirable.Having power is definitely not the same as being either valued, or even accepted, by others. Nor is the accumulation of enough power to intimidate others always a particularly successful way to win positive valuation and acceptance from others. We can see this, for instance, when crime bosses and drug lords definitely do acquire and wield power, and thereby cow others into submission and win their obeisance through bribery or intimidation—but then are loved, admired, or valued by few people. Also, once their power is somehow lost, so will be most of the submission, obeisance, and "respect" they once had, and they will probably be valued by yet fewer people than they were before they acquired power. Crime bosses who wield much power may be devalued even by those who depend on them, and when they lose their power, they may not only be fallen upon, but there may be no one to stand by them.We can further understand that power is not necessarily the way to positive valuation when we consider that many people with very little or no material power, or even no power whatsoever, can nonetheless be highly valued. For instance, many valued moral leaders (such as Gandhi) have held and exercised at least no material power; similarly, most newborns are highly valued by their families but possess zero power in any ordinary sense.Yet another question, though a secondary one, is what happens when people are de facto reduced in power and autonomy, regardless of how much one might like them not to be? For instance, when a person is in a coma, otherwise very ill, or profoundly mentally retarded—what then? It seems impossible to deny that then what happens to the person will depend almost entirely on how others around the person perceive him or her, and whether they value him or her positively and deeply.Thus, one might say that although powerful people can wrest from others some of the good things of life for themselves by their exercise of power, their ability to do so will largely or entirely desert them as soon as they suffer an appreciable loss in that power—which may happen to them (or anybody) at any time. At that moment, their fate will be determined by other factors, and one of the biggest such factors is the degree to which others feel positive about them, and hold them in positive regard.It is, of course, understandable that people—especially devalued ones—would deeply resent the fact that others are making value judgments about them, and that these judgments affect their social status and well-being in a negative way. Although this could be considered one of many sad facts of life—an expression of the imperfection of human nature—people imbued with modernistic values are no longer willing or able to see it this way, but believe that there is a brute-force solution to this problem, much as they believe that there is to virtually any problem. To the degree that this belief is resistant to empirical evidence about the cosmos and human nature—as it commonly is—it is in the de facto religious realm, as noted earlier.The more a person is impaired in normative competencies (and particularly in normative mental competency), the less a person will be able to exercise normative autonomy and "self-determination," and the higher becomes the risk that attempts at such exercise will cause harm—possibly of major extent—to self, and usually also others. This is why in apparently all cultures in the past, and many still today, a person known to be competency-impaired usually either was/is not asked to perform certain functions and fill certain roles, or was/is even outright forbidden to do so. Social Role Valorization acknowledges both the reality and the relevance of such competency impairments, emphasizes the importance of competency-enhancement, and predicts that to the degree that a party's competency impairments limit its ability to wisely make life decisions, and to understand and constructively deal with the good or bad consequences of those decisions, then to that degree things will go ill with that party unless other people with good sense, good judgment, wisdom, and positive feelings for the party are willing and permitted to make decisions for that party—again, to the degree the party is impaired in a particular competency at issue. This assertion is especially likely to be true if the other people will make the decisions in a way that is not unnecessarily image-degrading to the party. But, in its emphasis on granting people full "choice" and self-determination in all things, the power ideology trivializes, or even denies, the relevance or legitimacy of issues of competency in any such decisions.Further, if the idea of "choice" and self-determination in all things were taken at full face value and to its extreme, it would de facto result in what has come to be called "dumping," that is, in handicapped people not only being set into society free from all constraints or supervision, but also without the supports that they do to live and all, many such persons (or people who claim to speak for say that this is what they and commonly these this is what they SRV cannot us whether people should be but it can inform us of what this in the of people, and that this is largely bad things, and often even these this of action is widely even empowerment who self-determination as the good in life, and who an above all other issues of personal those where what a competency-impaired party or even is not in its then other parties on the that have a or even with the competency-impaired party can become very especially so if what the party or has also been defined as a legal However, at least SRV does not place an to to the impaired party's those who are in a to make such This is as noted SRV can only inform people how valued social roles for people can be either and protected, or and but does not any value Social Role Valorization us that where a would a person in competency or image, it is also to to more valued roles for the such a is apt to to the or loss of valued roles, and perhaps even to into the or cultures have always certain people to on certain others, and/or to see to it that impaired persons get what they even if it is not what such impaired persons say they want. However, SRV cannot as to what for making such decisions for others, because the of such is ultimately based on societal and on de facto or at least social science, can do is inform us of what happens when society does not the above However, the empowerment ideology would any or most or by others, and would even and competency-impaired people to whatever they want as their regardless of what the consequences might be to them or others of either such receiving them. In fact, such is a major reality in the of the empowerment with the power ideology is that in general are very and about what they want and how this to what they and they often say they want one thing when they really want or or do not what they want. Because this seems once to be a of human nature, or at least is an almost normative reality for humans, we live with it (and often from but the this are vastly when people are impaired in mental and perhaps deeply person who will every day for in a if the is likely to be rather than to be accorded "choice" and of the above are in a little I (Wolfensberger, called a to an in regard to how a party's and power are it is that one out as being very that power would be an through which people would get the good things of life, rather than being made an in (i.e., an life being defined as the good that autonomy may not be the same as and that either the autonomy or self-determination by empowerment would make the people feel good and even the most of the of devalued people will that these alleged or are at all the all For instance, people with great autonomy may have few to and all sorts of impaired people who have been out of into have autonomy, this autonomy it live often under material conditions vastly to those they under in over and over, one the that the power does not to or deal or even what happens to people who are devalued by society when they do things that deeply the values and of the valued (and usually of such will up even more and than they are and perhaps even get made may even be given their autonomy and not any of the other good things in life. extreme is being set out on a there to exercise power and do as one The fact is that so many people these are with the self-determination of impaired or devalued people, but not at their so that of how people get on into situations in which they perhaps even are made with the in to either their between SRV and an empowerment ideology becomes even in the very that these Social Role Valorization is an overarching and action scheme that how one may be able to people's social roles if that is what one to do, a major being that such value of people is likely to to the of good things to them by others. But empowerment or self-determination only power and of Nietzschean thinking have I seen an for power and autonomy that has an assertion that these things are a or should be a of Nietzschean thinking have I seen an of what would happen if were powerful and exercised all their even only all their the time. this with to be on an giving them all each the material power of a Nor have I ever seen in any of the in recent decades of religions of self-determination, empowerment, and rights in the of human or human an of any or of how these alleged should be to things such as of or even fact, when the power these speak of empowerment and self-determination, they often these ideas in a construct of rights, but ever out whether this is to be a legal rights or a human rights construct that human and and in the which the rather than human rights and what the of such rights is the fact that the of some people have a power construct that is not in of either but in the will (as in will to of and quite the vast majority of the recent on empowerment is based on a that or that there are with power, and that often the is to one's will to power rather than to more of empowerment and self-determination for impaired people at the namely, as is to be by and the of an of and as both and the as it (e.g., Wolfensberger, note also that the above was before and than inform us that impaired people to have competent at their if the are willing and able to make decisions on their even if these do not always a person of or course, it is quite that even when with the above some people will nonetheless a rather and empowerment and self-determination as a religion—in which it is that what they want really is power, and not valuation and acceptance by and from others, or perhaps even from one would not be with an empirical over what does and does not but with a at the of values and religious In a free people should have the to to a such people are mentally competent enough to have at least a of of the and the to themselves, both now and in the But to that one value and should be on others who do not the same the competencies to live a of religious to the that the is about religion rather than what there is a of on the of the power in that it to to people at risk in society what it is that does even when power that the power is from its is that there have never and never will social systems of any at all that are not course, one reason this is not is that the power people either do not believe it the of historical or do not want to believe it. they believe (or at least as if they that what others consider to be human nature is only and that one of the most and true of human history can be of course, as they are on with the power. this is of and and religions, such as yet another of or people is being by an and much as of such taught their of are yet other with the self-determination and power For instance, this ideology is deeply to of of However, a can deal with only of this issue.

Intellectual and developmental disabilities, 2011 · doi:10.1352/1934-9556-49.6.469