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Abstract
This article considers findings from two recent qualitative studies in the UK, identifying
parallels in the ways in which 'ecologies of practice' in two high-profile areas of
health-related intervention underpin processes of empowerment and recognition. The
first project focused on policy and practice in relation to teenage motherhood in
a city in the North of England. The second project was part of a larger research programme,
Changing Families, Changing Food, and investigated the ways in which 'family' is constructed
through policy and practice interventions concerning food and health. While UK Government
health policy stresses that health and social care agencies should 'empower' service
users, it is argued here that this predominantly reflects a managerialist discourse,
equating citizenship with individualised self-sufficiency in the 'public' sphere.
Drawing critically on Honneth's politics of recognition (Honneth, A. (2001). Recognition
or redistribution? Changing perspective on the moral order of society. Theory, Culture
and Society, 18(2-3), 43-55.), we suggest that formal health policy overlooks the
inter-subjective processes that underpin a positive sense of self, emphasising instead
an individualised ontology. While some research has positioned practitioners as one-dimensional
in their adherence to the current audit culture of the public sector in the UK, our
study findings demonstrate how practitioners often circumvent audit-based 'economies
of performance' with more flexible 'ecologies of practice.' The latter open up spaces
for recognition through inter-subjective processes of identification between practitioners
and service users. Ecologies of practice are also informed by practitioners' experiential
knowledge. However, this process is largely unacknowledged, partly because it does
not fall within a managerialist framework of 'performativity' and partly because it
often reflects taken-for-granted, gendered patterns. It is argued here that a critical
understanding of 'empowerment', in community-based health initiatives, requires clear
acknowledgment of these inter-subjective and gendered dimensions of 'ecologies of
practice'.