Power And Powerlessness Essay Example for Free

Power And Powerlessness Essay When I hear the word power many thoughts come to mind, but I feel power has many different forms. We could assume that power means more money, a bigger title, a corner office, a more generous budget, or â€Å"a seat at the table†. But that may not be true for everyone. For some, power may mean having the ability to control one’s career destiny in keeping with personal values and interests. Or power could mean having the opportunity to be creative as a project lead without too much interference from others. Or power could mean making decisions with trust and autonomy, such that no one can easily override your decisions. To me, power is control and the capacity to bring about change. For example, the United States government, they control everything and also other countries. Our government has the power to create and print money, regulate interstate and international trade, make treaties and conduct foreign policies, declare war, provide an army and navy, establish post offices, and make laws necessary to carry out these powers. In addition to their elusive powers, both the national government and state governments share the power of being able to; collect taxes, build roads, borrow money, establish court’s, make and enforce laws, charter banks and corporations, spend money for general welfare, and take private property for public purposes. Power is also acquired through possession or acquisition of the following resources: authority, money, status, knowledge, professional degrees, goods, services, votes, public support, information, ability to influence the media, and relationships with powerful people. Power can be derived from one’s authority to make decisions in organization s or by virtue of one’s gender, ethnicity, social class, or personal attributes, such as appearance and charisma. People often acquire power by establishing alliances and coalitions with others to support or oppose various policies or decision-making options. Workers in social service organizations also acquire power because they often decide whether individual clients receive services, resources, or referrals. But how would it feel to not have power, a sensation of being out of control with no apparent solution to help you to regain control, powerlessness. When the lack of capability to affect the realities of life that you can’t control such as; how others act towards you, if you will get a job you want, what the weather will be like, or if an accident will occur. Powerlessness can be simply defined as the absences of power resources. However, the â€Å"Mother of empowerment practice, Barbara Solomon (1976), defines powerlessness as a product of the interaction between individuals and the social structures that limit life opportunities for them: Powerlessness is defined here as the inability to manage emotions, skills, knowledge, and/or material resources in a way that effective performance of valued social roles will lead to pe rsonal gratification. The power deficiency so often seen among minority individuals and communities stems from a complex and dynamic interrelationship between the person and his relatively hostile social environment. When you feel powerless, you feel afraid to express your needs because you fear that what little you have will be taken from you. You may have learned powerlessness if you were kept in powerless positions repeatedly and/or over long periods of time, possibly during childhood, by those who used external forces (money, physical strength, legal status, and/or military force) to control you. You may have been abused as a child, a partner or spouse, an employee, a soldier, or you may have been the victim of racial or ethnic attacks. Such prolonged abuse can cause you to become afraid to feel even your own needs, to admit to yourself that you need something, you become immobilized and in certain critical ways you stop growing, you cease to thrive. When powerlessness is learned, it becomes self-perpetuating, even if the external forces are no longer there. An abused child may grow up to feel permanently powerless as an adult, even though his or her parents no longer have physical or economic power over him or her. One may then enter into a situation that repeats childhood experiences such as; living with or marrying an abusive partner, and therefore keeping oneself in externally imposed danger. Or one may keep oneself down through self-abuse, compulsive behaviors, and depression because the powerlessness has become internalized. The first step to overcoming learned powerlessness is to learn to feel entitled to your personal rights. You have the right to live a life free from physical, emotional, sexual, and financial mistreatment. You have the right to be treated with respect, to earn a livable income, to be informed of matters that affect you, and to express yourself freely, without harming others. Most importantly, you have the right to ask for what you need, even though you may be turned down, and to fight for what you need and want, even if you are turned down. Most people who have learned powerlessness barely feel entitled to speak, let alone to speak freely. Often professional therapy is necessary to overcome the ingrained patterns. Never the less, to overcome learned powerlessness, you must gradually, but persistently lay claim to each and every human right, one after the other. The purpose of the empowerment approach is to help people overcome feelings powerlessness by acquiring power. Mondros and Wilson (1994) differentiate power from â€Å"empowerment† by arguing that this second concept is actually a psychological state that â€Å"allows one to pursue concrete activities aimed at becoming powerful.† The literature on empowerment in organizations focuses on two distinct categories of organizations actors: program beneficiaries and staff members. Rapp, She ra, and Kisthardt (1993) define empowerment in individual clients as; confidence, control, decision authority, influence, autonomy, and self-trust.† According to Shera and Page (1995), empowerment of employees in organizations can be defined as, â€Å"a process of enhancing self-efficacy among organizational members through the identification of conditions that foster powerlessness and through their removal by both formal organizational practices and informal techniques that provide efficacy information.† Empowerment in the social services can take place within the context of relationships between workers and clients, within the organization’s formal decision-making structure, and within the contact between the organization and institutions or groups in its external environment. It should be noted that empowerment in organizations involves the redistribution of resources such as decision-making authority or goods and services. Therefore, in addition to producing specific outcomes, empowerment is a political process. Staff members may feel they will lose power and authority to make service decisions if clients are treated as equal partners in the decision-making process. Because one of the primary assumptions of empowerment in direct social work practice is to reduce feelings of powerlessness by increasing personal self-perceptions of one’s own power, the model focuses on facilitating the acquisition of leadership skills and actual political power among agency clientele. Staff members also acquire power through participation in organizational decision-making and by advocating for improvements in organizational policies and services. The organization gains political power as constituents become empowered to advocate for changes in government policies and campaign for meaningful social change. In conclusion, power, powerlessness, and empowerment all have a different meaning and serve a different purpose but each one has a powerful meaning in its own way.

Cyrano de Bergerac: Cyranos Qualities :: Cyrano De Bergerac Essays

Throughout Edmond Rostand’s classic play, Cyrano de Bergerac, the title character, Cyrano, is a passionate writer whose complex and rich personal qualities are the foundation of his peerless eloquence. Cyrano’s unrivaled sense of humor is a defense against those who humiliate him for his outlandish appearance. For example, during the â€Å"nose† speech, Cyrano challenges Valvert with twenty stunningly varied and complex alternative suggestions, one more stinging than the next, to replace Valvert’s banal attempt at insult. Cyrano's retaliation against Valvert's feeble attempt at embarrassment backfires as Cyrano destroys his opponent with a tirade of ingenious examples of how better to insult "the nose": â€Å"It’s a rock, a peak, a cape! No, more than a cape: a peninsula!† (41). In addition to Cyrano’s wit, his language is deeply thought-out and rich with poetic imagination. Cyrano amplifies upon a single word by using concr ete words to spin a simple concept into a memorable poetic experience. Cyrano illustrates the value of Christian’s need for a kiss from Roxane: â€Å"After all, what is a kiss? A vow made at closer range, a more precise promise, a confession that contains its own proof, a seal placed on a pact that has already been signed; it’s a secret told to the mouth rather than to the ear, a fleeting moment filled with the hush of eternity†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (126). Furthermore, it is in compensation for Cyrano’s great suffering that his verbal style is so sensitive and brilliant. He will always love in vain: 2 â€Å"Look at me and tell me what hope this protuberance might leave me!†¦I go into a garden, smelling the fragrance of spring with my poor monstrous nose, and watch a man and a woman strolling together in the moonlight. I think how much I, too, would like to be walking arm in arm with a woman, under the moon† (51). Incorporating cleverness and eloquence into his language, Cyrano replies to Le Bret’s sympathy with the response that he would never let a â€Å"sublime† tear be lowered by having to run down such an ugly nose.

The effects of having a Facebook profile

Facebook. com was created in 2004 and has quickly become a college phenomenon. Lately, it has transformed from a small Harvard students-only project into an exclusive 600 million users strong social portal, offering a window into the people's lives. Facebook, on its most basic level, redefines social networking and allows users to create and maintain virtual profiles that contain personal, academic and contact information. In many ways, Facebook has impacted on the social life and activity of people. The most common effects of having a Facebook profile are the lack of privacy, getting into addiction and neglecting the real, social life. To begin with, one of the major effects of using Facebook is the lack of privacy. Facebook's profiles are full of personal information like who people are, where do they work, what is their favorite music, movie or book. What religion and political beliefs are they. Moreover, there is also information where do people live and study. People share much of privacy, not only with their friends, but with strangers as well. Users upload their photos, let others to recognize them, consequently let others to know where do they party or who do they meet. Not by accident people say â€Å"Show me your Facebook profile and I will tell you, who you are†. Another effect of having a Facebook profile is a problem of addiction to the social network. Indeed, people wake up on a Saturday morning with their cup of coffee, caressing their senses and relaxing their brains. Sitting at their desk and browsing on Facebook. They have 20 new notifications since the previous night, a few group invitations, a suggested page, 5 friend requests, few of which are unknown persons. What is more, they do it everyday, spend major time chatting, searching, poking people on Facebook. They stay indoors, plugged to the web, try to stay in touch with the news. Whether they realize it or not, Facebook is a real part of their lives, a real partner that they see for good morning and kiss for good night. The last but not least effect of having a Facebook profile is neglecting the real, social life. First of all, it is quite easy to become one of many who have virtual relationships and before people realize it, they start to treat Facebook as their everyday social world. This, often results in a fear of real life meetings, as people who type a million words online, can find it difficult to express them-selves in real life. Moreover, it is very common that people add other users of Facebook as their friends, barely knowing them and they pretend to have a lot of friends, when in fact, they know just few of them in real life. To sum up, Facebook is becoming more and more popular, virtual, gigantic social machine. But life is to live and there are thousand of things waiting for people in the real life, nevertheless, they still decide to live on a Facebook profile which strongly affects their lives. The major effects of having a Facebook profile are the lack of privacy, getting into addiction and neglecting the real, social life.

Gender Wage Gaps And Gender Inequality - 1115 Words

According to Boris Hirsch and associates, gender wage gaps should vary among densely populated regions and less densely populated regions. Using an estimating Mincerian earnings function that controls for individual characteristics and reflecting the productivity of the worker, we are able to get the ceteris paribus of the gender pay gap that will not be able to be explained by any differences in the productivity of workers. They also used the approach developed by Oaxaca and Blinder which estimated two separate earnings functions- one for men and one for women. They then decompose the gender pay gap into two parts- an explained part due to different endowments in workers characteristics and an unexplained part. This is known as the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition (Hirsch et. al., 2009). In this study, the explained portion compares the earnings of men and women with identical observable characteristics. The unexplained part is derived by taking the mean over the log gender wage differe nce of the matched female-male observations and is comparable to the unexplained part of the gender pay gap that has been derived from a Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition that has been based on female characteristics and evaluated at the male coefficients. Essentially, the unexplained gender pay gap is the difference in the expected earnings of female and male workers with identical observable characteristics and is associated with discrimination (Hirsch et. al., 2009). Data for this study wereShow MoreRelatedGender Wage Gap And Gender Inequality1740 Words   |  7 PagesThe gender wage gap is defined as the relative difference in earnings between men and women in the economy as a whole. For every dollar a man makes, his female counterpart makes roughly seventy-seven cents. Even if a men and women have the same educational background and work history the man will go home with a higher paycheck than the woman. This may actually lead to tension in the workplace and cause conflict in the office. This also includes female dominated industries- most notably, nursingRead MoreGender Wage Gap Inequality And Gender Inequality Essay1880 Words   |  8 PagesArmando Suqui-Carchi Professor Pantano English 201 13 December 2016 Gender Wage Gap Inequality The gender wage inequality topic is one that has quietly laid in Americas closet of problems for decades. A female worker in Louisiana makes on average an alarming sixty-six cents compared to the dollar a man makes in twenty sixteen. When a father comes home after a forty-hour long work week making fifteen dollars an hour, he will open up a paycheck to six hundred dollars. When a mother comes home afterRead MoreGender Wage Gap And Gender Inequality1738 Words   |  7 PagesThe Gender Wage Gap is defined as the different amounts of money that is paid to women and men, often for doing the same work. Women who work full time, year round earn 77 cents for every dollar that men earn. Over a year women make $11,500 less than men and throughout their life this wage gap can affect women by making them earn anywhere from $400,000-$2 million less than men do. (Miller 2008, 6) The wage gap varies for women of different races. On average African-American women are paid 60 centsRead MoreGender Wage Gap And Gender Inequality2164 Words   |  9 Pages Throughout history, discrimination has wielded its ugly head in many different forms. Things such as, but not limited to, race, religion, appearance, beliefs and gender have consistently oppressed minorities. A continual discrimination that the women of the world are dealing with takes place in what has been promised to be a fair and unprejudiced environment: the work place. This issue deals with women not being paid the same amount of money as men even though they may be equally, if not more soRead MoreThe Wage Gap And Gender Inequality Essay1760 Words   |  8 PagesINTRODUCTION Women as a minority group concerning the wage gap, also known as the gender pay gap, is an older phenomenon that has gradually become more of a topic of concern since the 1960s. The wage gap is recognized as the difference between male and female earnings that is identified as a percentage of male earnings. In 1963 the Equal Pay Act was instituted declaring that it would be illegal to pay women lower wages simply based on their gender. The wage gap remains a popular area of active and innovativeRead MoreGender Wage Gap And Gender Inequality855 Words   |  4 Pages In general, the wage gap has narrowed at a slow, and uneven, pace over last three decades. Recent data shows that women in the American workforce earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earns (Trevino). The existence of this â€Å"gender wage gap† has been an issue since women entered the workforce. The ongoing issue of the past has now become an apparent problem in our modern-day, progressive society. Women nowadays have opportunities that were not obtainable in past decades but must overcome, or ignoreRead MoreGender Wage Gap And Gender Inequality Essay912 Words   |  4 Pagespay† by Lanier Isom is about the gender wage gap. The gender wage gap is the difference between male and female earnings. Isom basically states in this article that the wage gap exists because of gender, however many experts state that the wage gap simple does exists do to a factor such as gender, but of multiple factors. These factors being that the statistics presented in favor of a Wage gap ar e incorrect and manipulated to seem correct. That the so called wage gap may be in fact do to the choiceRead MoreGender Wage Gap And Gender Inequality Essay1519 Words   |  7 PagesGender Wage Gap Lydia Ogles November 2016 Introduction/Abstract The gender wage gap has been a nationwide problem since women were able to enter the workforce. Women have begun to speak out more about the issue and evaluate what they can do to change the industries and how they personally present themselves to help this change. Currently there is a wide range of opinions on this issue, with some saying it does not exist while others think it will ruin the economy if not fixed immediately. This makesRead MoreGender Wage Gap And Gender Inequality1697 Words   |  7 Pagesto be paid less wages than men, but this paper will argue in the U.S. today the gender wage gap still exists. The definition of gender wage gap as stated by the U.S. government is defined as women who work full time or salary based jobs who receive less earnings than their male counterparts who work equal level jobs (â€Å"Equal Pay,† n.d.).[] This analysis will focus on the years of 2012 to 2014, and in these years it is clear that the gender wage gap exists. The topic of gender wage gap sociologicallyRead MoreGender Inequality And Gender Wage Gap2375 Words   |  10 PagesThis is known as gender income difference i.e. the ratio of female to male median yearly earnings among full time year round workers. It is also the average difference between men’s and women’s hourly earnings, the gender pay gap has grown from 14.8 per cent last year to 19.7per cent this year, overtime not included.( Warren 2005) .Studies have shown that this gap has increased over the years, hence widening the gap in the society. These figures must act as a wake-up call for the government. Women’s