The Capability Approach in Employment and Labour Market Analysis

Speaker:

Prof. Kirsten Sehnbruch, the International Inequalities Institute, London School of Economics

Bio:

Prof. Sehnbruch studies the conceptualization and the measurement of the quality of employment in developing countries. She examines employment as a missing dimension of the capability approach, and empirically has established a summary indicator of job quality for 13 Latin American countries which will be extended to other regions of the Global South going forwards. Her work has informed social, labour and development policy. Kirsten’s articles have been widely published by leading academic and she has authored the book The Chilean Labor Market: A Key to Understanding Latin American Labor Markets.

On a theoretical level, the capability approach can be applied on three different ‘levels’: First, as a framework of thought, second, as a critique of other approaches to welfare evaluation, and third as a formula to make interpersonal comparisons of welfare (Robeyns, 2000). For Sen, their order of importance is precisely this ranking.

Arguments about how the capability approach can serve to frame a debate on employment from these perspectives continues to be under-formulated. The literature that conceptualises aspects of employment is often fragmented and directed at specific topics such as collective agency (Bonvin, 2012; Leßmann, 2022) or job quality (e.g. Green, 2025 and Stephens 2023). The job quality literature, in addition, has mostly focused on operationalising interpersonal comparisons of employment conditions, but has not sufficiently engaged with the distributional questions associated with job quality.

This theoretical paper therefore develops an employment-capability framework; relates it to other theoretical approaches to; and discusses how it can be used to undertake interpersonal comparisons. It concludes by showing an empirical example of how this approach can be operationalised.