A Capability Approach to talent management

This paper takes a fresh and radical look at organisational talent management strategies. It offers a critique of some of the prevalent assumptions underpinning certain talent management practices, in particular those fuelled by the narratives of scarcity and metaphors of war. We argue that talent management programmes based on these assumptions ignore important social and ethical dimensions, to the detriment of both organizations and individuals. We offer instead a set of principles proceeding from and informed by Sen’s Capability Approach. Based on the idea of freedoms not resources, the Approach circumvents discourses of scarcity and restores vital social and ethical considerations to ideas about talent management. We also emphasise its versatility and sensitivity to the particular circumstances of individual organisations such that corporate leaders and human resource practitioners might use the principles for a number of practical purposes

Gender Auditing in a Capability Approach

Feminist studies have developed several tools to assess the gender impact of public policy and, in particular, of public budgets. We introduce an innovative approach to gender auditing of public budgets inspired by the capability approach. On the one hand we expand the scope of assessing the gender policy impact taking into account women’s multidimensional wellbeing, on the other hand, we use a women’s perspective to conceptualize the capability approach and make it operational in the space of public policies. Within this extended reproductive approach, gender budgets could become a tool for advancing a reflection on social and individual well being and for greater transparency on the gender division of labour, the distribution of resources and sharing of responsibilitiesHuman development; Economics of gender; Gender auditing; Capabilty approach

A critical review of the capability approach in Australian Indigenous policy

The capability approach has recently been used in Australian Indigenous policy formation. Of particular note is how it has been used in some instances to justify current paternalistic and directive policies for Indigenous Australians. These include behavioural conditionalities on state support and income management—policy apparatuses that aim to create individual responsibility and to re-engineer the social norms of Indigenous people. This interpretation of the capability approach is at odds with the writings of Sen, because it overlooks the core concepts of freedom, agency and pluralism. To examine this tension, this paper reviews the contestation between capability scholars and commentators on Indigenous policy, paying particular attention to four areas: human capability vs human capital, deficit discourse, individual responsibility, and the ends and means of policy. Finally, to reinvigorate the capability approach in Australian Indigenous policy, six areas are suggested in which the capability approach could be used in the future

capabilitarianism

This paper offers a critique of Martha Nussbaum’s description of the capability approach, and offers an alternative. I will argue that Nussbaum’s characterization of the capability approach is flawed, in two ways. First, she unduly limits the capability to two strands of work, thereby ignoring important other capabilitarian scholarship. Second, she argues that there are five essential elements that all capability theories meet; yet upon closer analysis three of them are not really essential to the capability approach. I also offer an alternative description of the capability approach, which is called the cartwheel view of the capability approach. This view is at the same time radically multidisciplinary yet also contains a foundationally robust core among its various usages, and is therefore much better able to make the case that the capability approach can be developed in a very wide range of more specific normative theories. Finally, the cartwheel view is used to argue against Nussbaum's claim that all capabilitarian political theory needs to be politically liberal

Poverty and Wealth Reporting of the German Government: Approach, Lessons and Critique

The Capability Approach has been adopted as a theoretical framework for official Poverty and Wealth Reports by the German government. For the first time, this paper provides information on the use of the Capability Approach in this reporting process to international readers. We show the background and processes that might have led the government to adopt Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach as a framework for the reports and describe the Capability-related structure and main contents of the recent 3rd Poverty and Wealth Report. We also explain why the extension of the Capability Approach from poverty to wealth issues in German reports may be promising also for analyses of capability deprivation in general. Finally, we discuss major shortcoming and challenges of the reporting and end with a brief conclusion.capability approach, poverty, wealth, affluent countries, Amartya Sen

Commensurable freedoms in the capability approach

The basis of the capability approach (CA) was recently attacked by a paper by Prasanta Pattanaik and Yonghseng Xu: the CA is strongly committed to two substantial principles, dominance on the one hand, and relativism on the other hand. The authors have shown these two principles, along with a harmless continuity condition, are together inconsistent. The aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, it provides a discussion on the interpretation of this result, based on a reading of the literature on the CA, which brings to the fore the diversity of the approaches. On the second hand, it aims at proposing a way out from the impossibility, which yields to further discussions of Sen's CA.freedom, commensurability, capability, relativism, universalism, local ethics

The Capability Approach

In its most general description, the capability approach is a flexible and multi-purpose normative framework, rather than a precise theory of well-being, freedom or justice. At its core are two normative claims: first, the claim that the freedom to achieve well-being is of primary moral importance, and second, that freedom to achieve well-being is to be understood in terms of people’s capabilities, that is, their real opportunities to do and be what they have reason to value. This framework can be used for a range of evaluative exercises, including most prominent the following: (1) the assessment of individual well-being; (2) the evaluation and assessment of social arrangements, including assessments of social and distributive justice; and (3) the design of policies and proposals about social change in society. In all these normative endeavors, the capability approach prioritizes (a selection of) peoples’ beings and doings and their opportunities to realize those beings and doings (such as their genuine opportunities to be educated, their ability to move around or to enjoy supportive social relationships). This stands in contrast to other accounts of well-being, which focus exclusively on subjective categories (such as happiness) or on the means to well-being (such as resources like income or wealth)

A Sketch of a Humane Education: A Capability Approach Perspective

Poverty, understood as basic capability deprivation, can only be solved through a process of expanding the freedoms that people value and have reason to value. This process can only begin if the capability to imagine and aspire for an altenative lifestyle worthy of human dignity is cultivated by an education program that develops both the capability to reason and to value. These two facets play a major role in the creative exercise of human agency. This program of humane education can only come from an adequate description of the human agent as a persona that seeks to actualize itself based on his/her understanding of the good. Education must therefore seek to cultivate the capability to have an adequate conception of the good (normative) as well as the capability to constantly re-evaluate one’s conception of the good (evaluative) in order to freely and reasonably choose a life that one values and has reason to value. Education must therefore entail not merely the development of skills nor specialization in a particular field but must concentrate on the integration of the human person as a whole which leads to self-creative praxis

Subsidiary capability upgrading and parent-subsidiary relationship: insights from a Chinese acquisition in the UK

Purpose: - This study aims to explore capability upgrading of EMNE’s subsidiaries in developed countries and how the parent-subsidiary relationship influences such upgrading. Design/methodology/approach: - The study adopts an interdisciplinary approach to capability upgrading of EMNEs subsidiaries in developed countries. It employs a single case study to explore this under-research area. Finding: - the analysis challenges the orthodox view and suggests broad based capability upgrading has taken place in the EMNE acquired subsidiaries ranging from product, process, functional to intersectoral. In addition, the capability upgrading was contingent on the degree of subsidiary autonomy and subsidiary mandates. Originality/value: - This study represents one of the first to examine capability upgrading and parent-subsidiary relationship in the context of EMNEs’ internationalisation activities

On a shape adaptive image ray transform

A conventional approach to image analysis is to perform separately feature extraction at a low level (such as edge detection) and follow this with high level feature extraction to determine structure (e.g. by collecting edge points using the Hough transform. The original image Ray Transform (IRT) demonstrated capability to extract structures at a low level. Here we extend the IRT to add shape specificity that makes it select specific shapes rather than just edges, the new capability is achieved by addition of a single parameter that controls which shape is elected by the extended IRT. The extended approach can then perform low-and high-level feature extraction simultaneously. We show how the IRT process can be extended to focus on chosen shapes such as lines and circles. We confirm the new capability by application of conventional methods for exact shape location. We analyze performance with images from the Caltech-256 dataset and show that the new approach can indeed select chosen shapes. Further research could capitalize on the new extraction ability to extend descriptive capability