The popular and influential concept of employee empowerment may have the emancipatory potential its supporters claim, but it also is subject to constraints and inhibitions. Potterfield calls for actions to cut through the ideological inhibitors at the corporate level and also for ways to alter the prevailing socioeconomic structure, ways to enhance the relative strength of employees an various types of organizations. His book provides a synthesis of major empowerment theories and viewpoints, a discussion of its historical and intellectual roots, in inquiry into empowerment practices at a Fortune 100 company, and a discussion of both the emancipatory potential and ideological constraints in empowerment theories and practices. With specific recommendations for corporate and societal action, Dr. Potterfield's book will be important for professionals, teachers, and students in management, organizational studies, human resources, and organizational change. Potterfield begins by situating empowerment in the larger historical context of long-standing effort to provide more participatory work environments. He reviews the social and intellectual roots of the empowerment concept, including basic contoures of modernity such as the rise of capitalism, and examines the development of the concept within the realm of social action movements during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. He provides a detailed explication of the essential dimensions and core elements of empowerment as it is espoused by leading organizational theorists and management experts, then looks at the actual practice of empowerment in a Fortune 100 company that has a major, ongoing commitment to the empowered workplace. With this as a foundation he discusses ways in which these theories and practices either advance the cause of democracy and freedom in the workplace or reinforce corporate organizational power and worker dominations. He concludes with concrete suggestions for overcoming ideological influences and facilitating the emancipatory potential of empowerment.

Adult Education contradicts the theorists and practitioners who claim that empowering organizations can only be created when those at the top decide to share power. The emancipating educational processes are the tools of those who work within systems whether the issue is literacy, civil rights or democracy in the workplace. The Adult Education movement has linked its mission to cultivating the growth of democratic processes. Those people who work in organizations and are trying to improve their understanding of how to reshape the organization into a democratic workplace will find this useful.

In the face of authoritarian, divisive trends and multiplying crises, when politics-as-usual is stymied, Awakening Democracy through Public Work shows it is possible to build foundations for a democratic awakening grounded in deep American traditions of a citizen-centered commonwealth. Awakening Democracy through Public Work begins with the story of Public Achievement, a youth civic education and empowerment initiative with roots in the civil rights movement. It describes Public Achievement's first home in St. Bernard's, a low-income Catholic elementary school in St. Paul, Minnesota, and how the program spread across the country and then abroad, giving birth to the larger concept of public work. In Public Achievement, young people practice "citizen politics" as they tackle issues ranging from bullying, racism, and sexual harassment to playground improvements, curriculum changes, and better school lunches. They develop everyday political skills for working across differences and making constructive change. Such citizen politics, more like jazz than a set piece of music, involves the interplay and negotiation of diverse interests and views, sometimes contentious, sometimes harmonious. Public Achievement highlights young people's roles as co-creators—builders of schools, communities, and democratic society. They are not citizens in waiting, but active citizens who do public work. Awakening Democracy through Public Work also describes how public work can find expression in many kinds of work, from education and health to business and government. It is relevant across the sweep of society. People have experimented with the idea of public work in hundreds of settings in thirty countries, from Northern Ireland and Poland to Ghana and Japan. In Burundi it birthed a national initiative to rework relations between villagers and police. In South Africa it helped people in poor communities to see themselves as problem solvers rather than simply consumers of government services. In the US, at Denison University, public work is being integrated into dorm life. At Maxfield School in St. Paul, it is transforming special education. In rural Missouri, it led to the "emPowerU" initiative of the Heartland Foundation, encouraging thousands of young people to stay in the region. In Eau Claire, Wisconsin, it generated "Clear Vision," a program providing government support for citizen-led community improvements. Public work has expanded into the idea of "citizen professionals" working with other citizens, not on them or for them. It has also generated the idea of "civic science," in which scientists see themselves as citizens and science as a resource for civic empowerment. Awakening Democracy through Public Work shows that we can free the productive powers of people to work across lines and differences to build a better society and create grounded hope for the future.

"Structure and rules are, in fact, central to the answer. Workplace interactions are constrained by economic power and necessity, and often by legal regulation. They exist far from the civic ideal of free and equal citizens voluntarily associating for shared ends. Yet it is the very involuntariness of these interactions that helps to make the often-troubled project of racial integration comparatively successful at work. People can be forced to get along - not without friction, but often with surprising success.".

What role should political theory play in activating workers to engage in class struggle to extend participatory rights in the workplace and, in the process, expand and revitalize American democracy? Bachrach and Botwinick argue that the answer is to construct a theory of participatory democracy that would include a democratic concept of class struggle; a concept that provides workers and their allies an effective and legitimate course of political action. They see this concept not only as a means to encourage workers to become politically active to gain participatory rights, but also as a means to strengthen the democratic process as a whole. The authors contend that working-class struggle should be encouraged as a way of promoting the realignment of political parties along class lines and expanding citizen participation and public awareness of issues of national concern.To illustrate their theory, the authors describe and evaluate worker self-management programs in Germany, Sweden, France, Italy, England, and the United States. Hoping to spur Americans to confront their crisis of democracy with boldness and imagination, Bachrach and Botwinick demonstrate that class politics is on the agenda and that the categories of class and class struggle are now up for democratic definition in a way that is unique in this country. Author note: Peter Bachrach is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Temple University. >P>Aryeh Botwinick is Professor of Political Science at Temple University and the author of Skepticism and Political Participation (Temple).