Abstract
This paper explores issues concerning the empowerment of students of management. In so doing, analogies are drawn between empowerment in particular educational and managerial contexts. There is a focus on the relationship between the educational implications of empowering students and the post-educational experiences of interacting within, more often than not, hierarchical organizations. The author acknowledges the contradictions he feels exist and the disquiet these contradictions lead to in his purporting to practise student empowerment in what he personally experiences as a disempowering world. Consequently he employs the writing of a wide range of authors to deconstruct his own experiences as a lecturer in a school of management. Reference is made to personal experience, and underlying issues are explored through the thoughts of writers from the following traditions: neo-Lukacsian, determinist-Marxist, existential, radical and postmodern. The aim is not to provide prescriptive answers but to adopt a philosophical approach in the sense of philosophy as a `battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language' (Cooper, 1990: 21). The suggestion is that educationalists have too readily `talked into existence' the concept of empowerment without sufficient investigation into the nature of empowerment as an empirical reality.
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