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Abstract
Since the 1960s, the concept of ‘empowerment’ has featured across anti-discrimination legislation, human rights campaigns and community development and has become increasingly influential in both social work practice and mental health service design and delivery. Despite these developments, this concept is often still considered a ‘buzzword’, and the ambiguity and complexity involved in conceptualising and operationalising empowerment in practice has been highlighted in research. However, this body of literature is mainly contextualised in anglophone and European settings and lacks practitioner accounts of transferring the concept into practice.
This thesis presents a mixed methods cross-cultural study undertaken in Hong Kong and Sydney to address this gap. Informed by Systems Theory, methods comprised a critical policy analysis of recent mental health policy in Hong Kong and Sydney, a quantitative e-survey of 83 social work practitioners in Sydney and 80 in Hong Kong, and semi-structured interviews with 26 practitioners and six other key informants (e.g., social work educators) in the two settings.
Findings suggest that practitioners’ understandings of empowerment often undergo a process of interacting with key concepts that unpin the contemporary organisation of mental health care. Further, the various influences of policy discourses such as recovery were emphasised across the findings, which cautions against the tokenistic use of emancipatory discourse in policymaking and highlights the importance of a critical assessment of policy problematisations and effects. Participant accounts suggest that more attention should be directed to managing interpersonal dynamics beyond client–practitioner relationships in empowerment-oriented practice. The cross-cultural analysis highlights the importance of cultural reflexivity, focusing on the influences of individuals’ own cultural assumptions in shaping the ways practitioners negotiate challenges in front line practice.
Based on these findings, a new framework for understanding interactive empowerment praxis is proposed that highlights several professional abilities which may support practitioners in navigating the challenging process of mobilising social work knowledge in the increasingly complex and uncertain health and social care context. This thesis provides critical insights and recommendations for social work education and research which aim to enhance the creativity and adaptability of social work practice in different mental health settings.