The Search for Empowerment: Social Capital as Idea and Practice at the World Bank Book

The contributors to this collection examine the dynamics and institutional imperatives of the World Bank and explore the possibilities of internally generated change. The book focuses on the debates within the Bank about the efficacy of social capital concepts for the encouragement of more participatory and empowering forms of development practice and theory. These debates reach to the heart of the Bank and its mission. Indeed, the debate over social capital is less an argument about definitions, and more a struggle between competing paradigms of development. The Search for Empowerment is simultaneously a fascinating account of the concept of social capital, a powerful ethnography of a huge development organization, and a profoundly insightful exploration into the nature of bureaucracy and organizational change.Read More