Social and organizational empowerment as a research model to achieve sustainability

Abstract

This article is the product of a review of the recent literature on organizational and social empowerment as instruments for individuals in the organizational and social sphere to participate and influence the decisions that affect them and become development actors. It has been built with the objective of making a conceptual approach that informs the historical evolution of the categories of empowerment, social empowerment and organizational empowerment, from a socioformative perspective, accompanied by a socio-critical and transformative position to achieve sustainability, which raises the strategic opportunity of articulate organizational empowerment with social empowerment to energize spaces and instances of social and community participation that allow deepening and optimizing the democratic system in Latin American countries. The study was based on a documentary analysis that highlights social empowerment as the empowerment of people in society for political, social and economic participation and the articulation of the three propellants of development (business sector, government and civil society). It was concluded that, if there is the political will of governments, owners and administrators of business organizations and social organizations, such as academic ones, and citizens, the processes of the individual, organizational and social empowerment constitute an opportunity strategy to promote processes of organizational and social change that will allow to deepen and improve the quality of democracy, eradicate or control the political and administrative corruption that causes so much damage, successfully face poverty and inequality and ultimately facilitate the common good, prosperity and social justice.