From Critical Theory to Critical Pragmatism: Capability and the Assessment of Freedom

Abstract

This article discusses the implications of the double dimension of the capability concept, which is simultaneously normative and descriptive, in sustaining a critical approach toward freedom. Capability may provide a key concept for critical theory. It may also fuel critical pragmatism as anchored in committed empirical inquiry. Building on John Dewey’s pragmatist account, the article advocates a critical approach that is as much a matter of conceptual yardstick as of empirical inquiry. Taking reforms in the area of French continuing vocational training as a case in point, it demonstrates the analytical and critical power, when it comes to the idea of freedom, of a capability approach confronting three levels of inquiry that are usually investigated separately: the institutional (public policy) level, the organizational (in this case company) level, and the individual (biographical) level.

Keywords

capability critical theory critical pragmatism freedom inquiry multi-level analysis vocational training work

Introduction

Individual freedom has become the fulcrum of European welfare state modernization (European Commission, 2007), providing the basis for national labor market and social policies reforms (Van der Veen et al., 2012). These reforms institutionalize a normative and moral framework that makes the active, responsible and enterprising self a model according to which people are called to organize and make sense of their life (Foucault, 1988; Bröckling, 2007). This article discusses how the capability approach, as defined by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum (Nussbaum and Sen, 1993), can contribute to a critical assessment of this new generation of activation-oriented social policies whose key notions are individual freedom, responsibility and empowerment. It argues that capability offers a conceptualization of freedom that might help the social sciences to face the challenge of conceptually and empirically grasping the multi-sized and ambivalent implications of current economic, political and social transformations. In so doing, the article more broadly questions the contribution of the capability approach to critical sociology.

If being critical means exercising one’s judgment, then particular attention needs be paid to the means sustaining that exercise. The social sciences make use of at least two different means: concepts providing normative yardsticks against which to assess social situations and configurations (De Munck, 2011) – concepts such as domination, alienation, recognition or capability – and facts/data characterizing the reality under scrutiny and providing the empirical bases to be assessed.

The concept of capability bears this double normative and descriptive feature (De Munck, 2008). As a normative framework, it fashions an idea of justice based on equal freedom of choice and achievement (Sen, 2009). As a descriptive framework, it provides a conceptualization of freedom that can be parsed into subcategories suited for empirical inquiry. Beyond the description of bare assets, a central subject of inquiry turns then to the complex process of converting resources into outcomes that are of value to people.

Critical theory has made out of the conceptual normative yardstick a central issue for critical social sciences (Basaure et al., 2009), but it leaves the logic of inquiry – the type of data used (second-hand versus that produced by ad hoc empirical inquiry) and how it is produced (the methodological and epistemological conditions) – largely under-addressed. At the other end, John Dewey’s ‘critical pragmatism’ – though he himself never used the expression (Kadlec, 2006; Midtgarden, 2012) – brings the logic of empirical inquiry to the fore (Dewey, 1938).

Both centrally concerned with a critical account of freedom, critical theory and Dewey’s pragmatism (Honneth, 2011; Dewey, 1891) provide two equally suitable frameworks for sustaining a critical operationalization of the capability approach (Zheng and Stahl, 2011; Zimmermann, 2006). Their differences and complementarities have already been extensively discussed from a philosophical point of view (Bohman, 1999; Festenstein, 2001; Midtgarden, 2012; Frega, 2013) but the implications for sociological inquiry remain open to question – a question that this article aims to tackle by arguing that the methodological design of empirical inquiry provides a critical lever that is of equal power to the normative conceptual yardstick.

If we follow Dewey, the logic of inquiry involves a problem – a concrete issue to be dealt with (Dewey, 1938). For this reason, this article unfolds against the background of an empirical case-study, namely on the 2004 legal reform of employees’ vocational training in France. The leading research questions were stated as follows: Is this reform empowering employees in training matters, as it claims to be? If yes, for whom and under which conditions? What are the mechanisms involved? The aim is not to unfold the results of this study already presented in other papers (Lambert et al., 2012; Subramanian and Zimmermann, 2012), but to rely on them to fuel the discussion on capability and critical sociology with concrete insights. To this end, a brief overview of the French training system and its recent reforms is required (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Employees’ Training System in France.

The article will proceed as follows. A first part discusses the capability concept as defined by Amartya Sen (1993). Whereas its normative dimension is well established (Nussbaum, 2000; Sen, 1999), issues related to the method of empirical inquiry and its critical potential, however, remain underexplored. A second section positions the approach in relation to critical theory – inviting us to elucidate the critical dimension of the capability concept and the type of normative framework it involves – and Dewey’s pragmatism – highlighting the crucial role of the inquiry and how it combines conceptual and empirical requirements in a critical perspective. A third section illustrates the critical potential of pragmatism, building on the results of an empirical inquiry into employees’ training capabilities in France. Finally, a last section proposes a methodological framework for a critical pragmatism based on multi-level analysis aiming a critical understanding of the processes shaping people’s capabilities or lack of capabilities. The upshot is a critique of freedom that moves beyond the ascertainment of systemic or structural contradictions to give central place to the contradictions experienced by people in their everyday lives and what these contradictions ultimately mean to them and their living together.

Capability as a Conceptualization of Freedom

Freedom has been a profoundly contested issue in the economic and welfare transformations of European societies ever since the 1980s. On the one hand, companies strive for flexibility and corporate freedom – this mostly translating into a deregulation/reregulation process that downgrades individual legal and social protection in the name of economic competitiveness in a globalized world (Zimmermann, 2000); on the other hand, freedom has become a seductive catchword of corporate human resource policies and social-policy reforms offering to enhance individuals’ responsibility and opportunities for self-realization (Bonvin, 2008; Zimmermann, 2011). This latent tension inhering in the notion of freedom is reinforced by the fact that people themselves evaluate it as a means of self-realization (Davoine and Méda, 2010). Freedom thus emerges as an inescapable object of inquiry in any sociological assessment of this liberal socio-economic nexus and its actual effects on society and people’s lives. However, due to its profound ambivalence, freedom is a highly suspicious issue for sociologists. Apart from a few exceptions (Hillery et al., 1977), when sociologists address freedom they do it in a theoretical manner (Simmel, 2009 [1908]; Aron, 1998 [1965]; Kärtner, 2016), while empirical studies primarily focus on the other side of the coin: alienation and domination (Stewart, 2001).

The Capability Approach

First implemented in development economics, the capability approach problematizes freedom in relation to well-being (Sen, 1993), inequality (Sen, 1992) and social justice (Sen, 2009). Sociologists entered into the discussion only later. The fact is that this approach – mainly nurtured by economic and philosophical thinking – emphasizes an evaluative and normative strain that is not directly operational for sociological inquiries. In a former article I proposed to bridge the capability approach with Dewey’s pragmatism in order to make out of it more than just a normative horizon for sociological inquiries (Zimmermann, 2006). I will not reintroduce that discussion; instead, building on it, I will address the methodological aspect of the problem and its critical potential.

The defining feature of the capability approach is to ask about people’s real freedom to choose the life that they have reason to value (Sen, 1999). In ‘Equality of What?’ (1992), Sen demonstrates why the yardstick allowing for the measurement of (in)equal well-being among people can neither be reduced to monetary assets and commodities nor to subjective utility or satisfaction. He proposes instead to focus on the freedom a person has ‘to do valuable acts or reach valuable states of being’ – what he calls ‘the capability to achieve valuable functionings’ (Sen, 1993: 30, 31). This leads him to make freedom to choose and achieve into a major principle of social justice.

On this basis, capability – oriented toward individual well-being and self-fulfillment – sustains a conceptualization of freedom grounded in three constitutive dimensions: freedom of choice, freedom to achieve, and social commitment. The difference between freedom from (in the sense of the absence of hindrances to action) and freedom to (in the sense of having the means for achieving action) underpins the whole. Beyond this classic philosophical distinction,¹ more important is how the capability approach combines these two sides of freedom in order to develop an evaluative framework for assessing economic, social and political arrangements. To clarify this point, let us elaborate a bit further on the empirical issues that arose from this subdivision of capability into three different lines of inquiry.

A Matter of Freedom of Choice

Freedom of choice requires opportunities and the existence of different options; for example the possibility for an employee to choose to train or not to train, as well as the type of training she wishes to pursue. If the possibility of choosing is indeed available then it further involves an individual process of valuation that allows for the comparative assessment and ranking of the different options at hand. Sen does not say much about the psychological and social mechanisms underpinning this process of valuation except that it might be impinged upon by adaptive preferences. This means that a person who for years had been living in a situation of tightly constricted choice would end up resigning herself to that situation and be blind to any possibilities other than those appertaining to her current daily life (Watts, 2013). Thus our inquiry into training capabilities shows that the employees who were most deprived of access to vocational training were paradoxically those – all other factors being equal – who were least likely to express any discontent regarding a perceived lack of training or to express any desire for such (Lambert et al., 2012).

A Matter of Power to Achieve

But freedom of choice is not enough to sustain capability; above and beyond freedom to choose, capability implies freedom to achieve, i.e. access to the means for realizing one’s choice. On this point Sen opposes Rawls, arguing that any theory of justice based solely on the requirement of equal resources is incomplete without taking into account the issue of converting those resources into accomplishments (Sen, 2009). At one and the same resource level – for instance the ‘individual right to continuing vocational training’ as stipulated by French law – various factors such as age, gender, qualifications, ethnic and social origins and most importantly company-related factors may interact and result in unequal opportunities and means for converting the resource and therefore gaining access to training – let alone training that is of real value to oneself. By underscoring the fact that formal rights are not enough to secure individual freedom, the capability approach moves investigations into the realm of the various conversion factors – personal, social and environmental (Robeyns, 2005) – that impact the translation of those rights into real achievements. These conversion factors include the collective arrangements that sustain employees’ power to achieve. This leads us to investigate social and corporate policies both in terms of the range of possibilities they afford (opportunity-freedom in Sen’s words) and the processes that govern their implementation (process-freedom) along with the actual achievements they allow for.

A Matter of Social Commitment

In its positive form of power to achieve, capability highlights the collective dimension of individual freedom. Because it pertains not only to individual factors but results from the interaction between a person and her environment, capability defined as equal freedom to choose and achieve is a matter of social commitment (Sen, 1999, 2009). Unfortunately, Sen says little about how to implement this agenda, except that we should leave it to democratic processes. As far as sociological inquiries into capabilities are concerned, it might be helpful to focus the questioning more precisely on the institutional and organizational dimensions of capabilities, at least within Western democracies, where institutions and organizations provide the means of both defining, enforcing and reshaping principles of justice and democracy.

Illustrating the crucial role of institutions and organizations in the field of continuing vocational training is the decisive but often blurred difference between skills (compétences in French) and capabilities. Individual capability surely encompasses individual skills, but it is more than that since it entails those socially structured opportunities which allow for expression and development of one’s skills. Furthermore, it involves entitlements (e.g. training rights) that make it possible to seize these opportunities (e.g. companies’ training programs) and convert them into achievements that are of real value to oneself (skills of a certain type and not just any job adaptation skills). Entitlements bring demands for justice and social responsibility into play. This means inquiring into the legal, social and economic resources that people can actually convert into valuable training achievements in a given situation as well as analyzing those collective arrangements which allow equal access to these resources and achievements. Thus, capabilities take on board the environmental conditions that shape or constrain the expression and development of individual skills. They are neither just a matter of individual assets nor of structural conditions; they fundamentally result out of their interactions.

Beyond the Concept as a Normative Yardstick: The Critical Power of Empirical Inquiry

As a normative concept driven by a principle of justice focusing on equal freedom to choose and achieve, capability provides a critical yardstick against which to assess the social world, its structuring principles and individual effects. As a descriptive concept broken down into a series of items suited for empirical inquiry – opportunities, resources, entitlements, conversion factors, achievements – it calls for an understanding of the mechanism underpinning individual agency (Zimmermann, 2006; Gangas, 2015). As such, the capability approach meets the requirements of different critical perspectives, notably critical theory and critical pragmatism. Indeed, these two perspectives share enough important features to have encouraged authors like Jürgen Habermas, Hans Joas or Axel Honneth to engage in attempts to bridge them (Joas, 1993; Ray, 2004; Honneth, 2011).

Both perspectives combine a conceptually driven theoretical approach with an aim of transforming society – or, in Dewey’s words, ‘reconstructing’ society (Dewey, 1920; Frega, 2013; Jaeggi, 2014). Another of their common features is immanent criticism based on the unveiling of internal contradictions to the very object of inquiry (e.g. the internal contradictions to the French training reforms or the contradictions between the legal wording of these reforms and their concrete implementation). But the view point, the layer of social reality they primarily focus on (Shalin, 1992; Hetzel, 2008) and, as a corollary, how empirical data are produced and treated, their assigned role in the production of critical knowledge, differ. Thus Habermas’ contribution to linguistic pragmatics focuses on humans’ universal skills and competences, whereas Dewey’s pragmatism concentrates on individuals’ effective capabilities depending upon situated configurations of action. While dedicated situated inquiry is essential to Dewey’s approach, it is not an issue in Habermas’ theoretical perspective.

Critical Theory: The Primacy of a Theory-Driven Normative Yardstick

Even when critical theorists make strong pleas in favor of a socio-anthropological approach taking people’s experience on board – like Honneth differentiating himself from Habermas in this regard (Honneth, 2011) – the critical crux does not actually emerge from the socio-anthropological inquiry. The latter is rather conceived as a provider of facts and data that illustrate, sustain and flesh out critical statements elaborated at another level. If empirical data do have their importance, their production pertains to a technical, second-order issue and is not necessarily the result of dedicated empirical inquiries conducted by the researcher herself. Critical theory reasoning is foremost of a deductive nature. What comes first is the normative goal and the type of society or world promoted thereby – recognition in Honneth’s case, capability in the perspective of the present article – an ideal goal endorsed by the researcher himself (Genard, 2001).

What does this mean for analysis of the French 2004 training reform? Using the capability concept as a normative yardstick – understood as a desirable principle of justice that should shape the world – a critical theory approach will demonstrate that the 2004 law instituting an individual’s right to training pertains to a conception of political economy that can hardly foster employees’ training capabilities because this law is nurtured by two conflicting ideologies: individual freedom and controlled activation. The critical discussion will focus on the inherent contradictions in the conception of freedom, justice and equality fueling the law; it will denunciate a negative conception of freedom that focuses on opportunities and formal equality to the detriment of real power to choose and act.

Critical Pragmatism: When the Normative Yardstick Proceeds from Empirical Inquiry

Whereas critical theory has been and is still broadly implemented and commented upon throughout the world, critical pragmatism has historically been less systematized and discussed, although its appeal has been rediscovered in recent years (Bohman, 1999; Festenstein, 2001; Kadlec, 2008; Midtgarden, 2012; Frega, 2013). In contrast to critical theory, critical pragmatism presupposes dedicated empirical inquiry and methodology, giving consistency to Honneth’s call for a socio-anthropological approach. This does not mean that pragmatism only seeks to establish and describe the bare facts; rather, it relies on Peirce’s demanding principle of abduction (Peirce, 1934; Timmermans and Tavory, 2012), meaning a permanent and integrated back and forth movement between inductive (fact-based) and deductive (theory-based) knowledge production, i.e. between empirical and conceptual inquiry. Dewey (1938) describes such an inquiry process as an integrated combination of operations of observation (empirically-oriented) and ideation (conceptually-oriented). By distancing oneself from any general deductive framework, such an approach makes the empirical matrix and its methodology as significant as the conceptual and theoretical one.

Hence critical pragmatism places the logic of empirical inquiry first, using as a critical yardstick the normative concepts at work in the surveyed field; that is, in the case of French continuing vocational-training policies, individual freedom and responsibility. Contradictions are its fulcrum as well, but these are made visible by observing what actually happens in concrete situations, from the interplay between prescribed principles of normativity and the different factors involved in shaping individual and collective agency. The content of critical statements thus stems from the inquiry process itself aimed at confronting the normative prescriptions that are supposed to structure life in society and the actual means people have of coping with or fulfilling them in a given environment and situation.

For Dewey such a confrontation-based inquiry means pointing out the ‘inconsistencies, the incoherencies, the compromises, the failures, between the actual practices and the theory at the basis of these practices’ (Dewey, 1891: 190). ‘The theory at the basis of practices’ primarily refers in Dewey’s words to the institutions – understood in a very broad sense including religion, family and habits – the aim being to test the concrete uses and effects on people’s everyday lives of those moral principles which these same institutions claim to defend and enforce.

Reflective intelligence cross-questions the existing morality and extracts from it the ideal which it pretends to embody, and thus is able to criticize the existing morality in the light of its own ideal. (Dewey, 1891: 190)

Thus Dewey’s critical standpoint is clearly an immanent one. But immanence here is not only a matter of systemic contradictions; above and beyond the system, it makes sense of the contradictions made visible at the individual scale and resulting from the clash between different layers of social reality, reaching from institutions to individuals. Pragmatism targets the tension and contradictions entailed in values and moral ideals when scrutinized within the framework of concrete situations of action, insofar as it involves voice and reflexivity of not only the researcher but ordinary people too.

Pragmatism and the Capability Approach

Critical pragmatism reveals itself to be all the more pertinent for inquiring into capability that Dewey himself – in his early works on moral philosophy – made it part of his conceptual arsenal alongside ‘development’ and ‘freedom’. He not only made use of the word but distinguished it from ‘capacity’, thus prefiguring the meanings that Sen imparts to these terms. ‘We call a capacity, capability, possibility, as if for the very purpose of emphasizing the necessity of external supplementing’, writes Dewey (1891: 98). He distinguishes here between capacity – as internal to the individual and proper to him – and capability resulting from the interaction between the capacity of this individual and his environment.

Even more important is the fact that Sen is not lacking any acquaintance with Dewey’s work – in September 1984, at an early stage of the elaboration of his capability approach, he gave a series of Dewey lectures at Columbia University where Dewey has been a professor. Entitled ‘Well-being, Agency and Freedom’ (Sen, 1985), these three lectures develop a moral approach to well-being and agency while raising the issue of the admissibility and use of different types of information in moral valuation. Sen explicitly takes up Dewey’s concept of valuation and joins his call for ‘moral inquiry’ in light of the entanglement of facts and values and ‘the need to relate moral valuation functionally to factual circumstances’ (Sen, 1985: 173). Though Sen would make no further reference to Dewey in later works, at the same time he never denied the affinities spelt out in the 1984 text – affinities which are still noticeable in the current contours of the capability approach (Putnam, 2002; Zimmermann, 2006). As a general rule, Sen refrains from attaching the capability approach to specific theoretical or methodological frameworks, leaving it open for different uses, and it is precisely this openness which makes both critical theory and pragmatism possible candidates for implementation of his approach.

Training Capability: A Pragmatist Approach

Where critical theory is keen to formulate statements regarding ideological and societal contradictions or paradoxes (Honneth, 2002), critical pragmatism inquires as to the factors and processes that turn these paradoxes into contrasted individual capabilities or uncapabilities in concrete situations.

People and their Environment: A Relational and Processual Approach

Following Dewey (1938), a situation should be addressed as the result of a process of interaction between an organism and a given environment. This requires a relational, i.e. transactional, approach that makes out of the employees (individual level) and their work environment (organizational level) two equally important objects of inquiry beside public policies. Thus, beyond the internal contradiction of the training law promoting individual freedom together with enforced activation, critical pragmatism will bring to the fore the crucial role played by the type of environment provided by a given company in the implementation of this law and its actual consequences for employees. To this purpose, dedicated empirical inquiries situated in space and time are needed. As for the French vocational-training study, a qualitative inquiry was conducted together with Delphine Corteel and Dilip Subramanian from October 2004 to July 2009 in 13 French companies in the automobile, cleaning, pharmaceutical, chemical and software-engineering sectors. It was launched within the framework of two successive European Union research projects: Eurocap and Capright. The method of inquiry was based on ethnographic observation and 174 semi-structured interviews (Zimmermann, 2011). The study was developed in collaboration with Marion Lambert and Josiane Vero, who were doing a connected quantitative survey within the context of the larger project (Lambert and Vero, 2013).

Contrary to what former studies, focused exclusively on the individual and public policy level, had asserted, our findings show that employees’ occupational and training trajectories are not the most influential factors in their aspiration to undergo vocational training; the introduction of the firm level allowed us to show that the environment provided by each company contributes even more decisively to shaping these aspirations. Employees’ aspirations for training were found to be all the more strongly expressed when a series of conditions were met at the firms employing them: the existence of training opportunities, access to information, latitude for individual and collective voice, and the possibility of horizontal and vertical mobility (Lambert et al., 2012).

Going beyond companies’ policies and scrutinizing situated everyday practices, our qualitative study further showed the determinant role of how HR policy, management practices and work organization concretely interplay with each other, in shaping French employees’ training capabilities (Zimmermann, 2011). Indeed, contrary to all expectations, the firm in our sample which emerged as the most capability-enhancing did not fall within the IT-knowledge and advanced-business-service firm ranking among the so-called ‘learning organizations’ (DiBella, 1995), but the heavy-trucks assembler, most of whose work is performed on the assembly line in accordance with a neo-Taylorist organization of work (Subramanian and Zimmermann, 2012). Critical pragmatism can make a contribution in establishing this counterintuitive outcome – thus providing keys of understanding as to just why a neo-Taylorist organization can be more capability-enhancing than a ‘learning’ one – while also producing a typology of companies as gauged by the scope they afford employees’ training capabilities, namely a typology differentiating non-training, skill-updating, skill-developing and capability-enhancing organizations (Subramanian and Zimmermann, 2013). Part of the exercise was to analyze how the type of environment provided by the company interacts with personal background and institutional prescriptions in the unfolding or impediment of professional pathways that are of value to people (Zimmermann, 2011).

A Typology of Firms Intercrossing Training Opportunities, Processes and Outcomes

Let us briefly characterize each of the three training-friendly types, which have been constructed with consideration of training opportunities, processes and outcomes companies provide.

Skill-updating companies focus on daily work practices. The objective is to try and ensure the workforce adapts to changing job requirements; but it does so without attaching any importance to skill transferability and professional development. As far as processes are concerned, there is no room for the expression of employees’ preferences or the promotion of professional projects. Opportunities are limited: the purpose of vocational training is above all to foster learning that is firm-specific in content and delimited by functional job requirements, thereby restricting the benefits employees can hope to derive from the acquisition of new skills. Such a training policy allows employees at best to maintain their position on the job ladder; under no circumstances, however, does it unlock possibilities for mobility or career advancement either on the internal or the external labour market.

Skill-developing companies encourage the acquisition of individual and collective knowledge in a professional environment more broadly concerned with learning processes. It promotes different types of skills, including general skills characterized by a high degree of transferability; the firm accepts the risks attached to the likelihood of employees seeking to cash in on these skills on the external labour market. Nevertheless, training is driven by the overall development of the organization and grants little, if no, latitude to individuals’ own preferences in formulating their development projects.

Finally, capability-enhancing companies can be defined as skill-developing companies which additionally provide collective means for supporting employees’ personal development goals. Our enquiry has enabled us to identify three interrelated conditions that are necessary, although not always sufficient, to sustain a capability-enhancing training policy. The first bears upon the organization of work. It must be designed in such a way as to absorb absences for off-the-job training (whereby employees can acquire general, transferable knowledge) without affecting the efficiency and performance of work teams. The second condition entails a constructive partnership between the HR department and operational managers in order to facilitate the implementation of a capability-oriented policy. Each side needs to take account of the constraints the other faces to ensure that the overall objective of individual and organizational development is achieved. The third necessary condition pertains to the participative character of the work organization which in turn is related to managerial practices in general. The procedures connected with employee participation play a crucial role in the overall process, bearing a close relation to what Bonvin (2008) calls ‘capability for voice’, i.e. the ability to express one’s opinion and make it count. Because voice implies both the capability to determine what one values – in the sense of Dewey’s valuation process (1991) – and to make oneself heard, it is a prerequisite, the very condition of all the other capabilities. However, not all kinds of employee participation meet the requirements for individual capabilities to flourish. Social dialogue, which can take the form of collective agreements negotiated both at sectorial and enterprise level, has for long been the privileged means whereby employees are enabled to exercise their freedom to participate in the workplace. Yet the inquiry we conducted suggests that while the existence of such a dialogue is crucial (in companies without a strong collective voice or negotiating position vis-à-vis training, the training capabilities are limited and even non-existent), it does not actually suffice in ensuring employees’ training capabilities in the absence of other more direct forms of participation where all workers are able to take part.

Capability means being able to play an active role in one’s training and occupational development, and this requires being able to contribute to the decisions shaping one’s existence, i.e. an ability to weigh in on one’s working environment not only technically but politically and morally as well. Therefore, capability raises the critical issue of how to recast the forms of collective action so as to give broader significance to individual voice – allowing people to express what they value – alongside collective representative voice – seeking to remedy unequal access to individual voice and to foster social justice.

Methodology as a Critical Asset

Educing a critical asset from the logic of practical inquiry is a powerful and original contribution of pragmatist thinkers to the critical social sciences (Bohman, 1999; Festenstein, 2001). Following Dewey, inquiry means not only producing factual data but elucidating meanings, i.e. the meaning of action from the point of view of those who achieve it or are subjected to it; it is insofar that practical inquiry has both a normative and a factual dimension. Designed to resolve problematic situations, inquiry encompasses, as Festenstein (2001) has clearly stated, both interpretation and critique, taking the inescapable entanglement of facts and values (Putnam, 2002) as a constitutive concern the researcher must perforce engage with. However, after elucidating these constitutive dimensions, Dewey has little to say about the concrete methodological design of inquiry resulting therefrom.

Yet, at least two important methodological consequences follow from his confrontation-based conception of inquiry. The first is multi-level analysis combining different scales of analysis and grappling with what happens on and in between each of these levels (Zimmermann, 2011; Hobson, 2013); the second consists of the symmetry of investigation among various stakeholders. The first principle is coherent with the fact that capability is neither a simple matter of subjective meaning nor of mere distribution of resources, whereas the second principle translates as a methodological consequence of a democratic impulse (emphatically laid claim to by both Dewey and Sen) which gives equal weight to all voices.

A Multi-Level Analysis

Multi-level analysis is the methodological upshot of an understanding of individual capability as resulting from the interaction between a person and her environment; the scales involved stem from the environmental context appertaining to the research question under scrutiny. As far as our research on training capability is concerned, three main scales of analysis have been identified and investigated – the institutional level (public policies and collective agreements reaching from European guidelines to French sectorial agreements), the organizational level (firms’ monographs addressing work organization, personal policies as well as management practices and companies’ collective agreements) and the individual level (biographical interviews with people working in these firms and covering the whole range of qualifications and hierarchical levels, from manual worker to CEO as well as elected staff representatives). The inquiry consisted of confronting institutional semantics with their implementation at the organizational level and of analyzing their effects and meanings for the employees. Such a multi-level analytical framework allows us to highlight the gap and contradictions between social-policy prescriptions or promises on the one hand and individuals’ aspirations and available means to achieve them on the other; furthermore, it fosters an understanding of the social mechanisms configuring these gaps; and finally, it reveals how these different levels interact with and contradict or reshape each other.²

The institutional scale is where reality is prescribed, i.e. as the powers-that-be would have it. It concerns public-action schemes and the definition of norms – namely, the normative framework as determined by the French 2004 reforms pertaining to individual continual vocational training. However, this level cannot be reduced to a single player, for it involves complex mechanisms engaging different normative bodies and actors. In the case of French continual vocational training, European bodies and their flexicurity prescriptions settle the general framework; forming the basis of legislative work are then French trade-union and employers’ associations which hammer out intersectoral national agreements every five years; and finally there is the parliament, which translates these agreements into law. It is worth noting, for instance, that the European concept of ‘lifelong learning’ (European Commission, 2001) was legislatively translated into the 2004 French law as ‘lifelong vocational training’, which limits the concept’s scope to include only employees and their professional life whereas the European formulation encompasses any type of education, learning and training at whatever age (Caillaud and Zimmermann, 2011).

The organizational scale is where these reforms and schemes are supposed to be implemented, but also where specific norms and policies can be defined. As far as training policies are concerned, this scale involves administrative and public bodies such as employment offices for the jobless, training funds for individual training leaves, and companies as a primary means for employees’ vocational training and learning. This demands an inquiry into the way companies implement training and learning schemes as well as looking into the opportunities they make available to employees in these matters. This in turn leads to the tackling of an important issue that follows from activation social policies but is never addressed as such – namely, the company’s responsibility in providing workers the access to those basic means which will allow them to orchestrate their own training and professional development. The crucial point here is to promote research on social policies beyond public institutions in order to identify and study all the players and mechanisms involved in their implementation.

The individual scale is concerned with those people who are most directly affected, positively or negatively, by institutional norms and companies’ policies. It aims to study how people experience training reforms not only with respect to their position within the company and society but with regard to what really counts for them as individuals. By way of biographical interviews it focuses on identifying those various elements whose interaction may differ from one case to the other in defining training opportunities, outcomes, but also what precisely valuable training means. Thus, interviews are not only a matter of gaining access to concrete information regarding individuals’ training but affording access to subjective meaning, to the way people cope with and make sense of institutional frameworks, company policies and their own experience.

This is the reason why biographical interviews play a crucial role in the methodological design. Notwithstanding the importance of the institutional and organizational levels, the biographical one appears to be the nexus where all the others intersect – this is also the reason why, conversely, it does not make sense to investigate it separately from the others. The individual level is where resources and constraints are to be dealt with, and where capability or lack of capability have their expression. It is the level where people experience full-scale life in all its materiality and sensitivity and where they make sense of it – which is a matter of central significance for critical pragmatism.

A Principle of Symmetry

The second methodological principle, complementary to the first, is one of symmetry, which is an extension of Bloor’s principle (1976). It seeks to understand the points of view, practices, experiences and values of all the stakeholders by using the same methodological and analytical tools and giving them the same weight without any hierarchical ordering related to people’s position in society or in a given organization.

Thus two main strains of research address learning, training and development in the workplace. On the one hand, management and organization studies approach these issues from the standpoint of company strategy and returns on investment, coining the concepts ‘organizational learning’ and ‘learning organizations’ (DiBella, 1995), which emphasize the way an organization can learn or foster learning. These studies focus on organizational capabilities while leaving employees’ capabilities largely uninvestigated. On the other hand, sociology along with the educational and political sciences work with a concept of ‘life-long learning’ (Field, 2006), which focuses on individual learning or training experiences and public policies. These two families of approaches seldom overlap. However, asking whether and how companies influence employees’ capabilities in relation to learning and professional development – be it positively or negatively – as well as inquiring into the organizational conditions and mechanisms at stake in this process requires bridging these two tracks in one and the same research schema. One way of doing so is to conduct detailed interviews with not only those who define and implement the company’s policies (managers) or those who are the target of the latter (workers) but with all of them, i.e. with employees ranging from the lowest qualified workers to top managers, also including union representatives. Such a symmetrical approach allows a balanced cross-examination as to whether an organization provides a work environment allowing workers to foster their training capability. Beyond the mere evaluation of capabilities/lack of capabilities and their distribution, such a symmetrical approach helps to develop an understanding of the social mechanisms that generate (in)equalities, (im)balance of power, and voice(lessness) in the implementation of a training law that claims equal rights for all. Beyond formal rights on the one hand and individual pathways on the other, it foregrounds the critical role played by the environment as provided by the firm in developing individuals’ training capabilities – that is to say, in individuals’ freedom to choose and achieve the type of training that they have reason to value.

Conclusion: Capability and Freedom through the Lens of Critical Pragmatism

In following Dewey we are led to conceive the methodological design of inquiry as a truly critical lever and the definition of the normative yardstick as intimately related to the empirical inquiry. When grounded in the logic of a multi-scale and symmetrical inquiry, critical pragmatism provides a means of addressing the tensions and contradictions among the various factors shaping individuals’ freedom while paving the way for an immanent and comprehensive critique of those public and corporate policies that claim individual freedom as their goal and driver. Required therefore is an in-depth scrutiny of these policies and an analysis of their impact in terms of different persons, environments and situations. Such an inquiry-based approach, allowing for a precise understanding of the social mechanisms involved, is crucial to the articulation of an accurately targeted critique that goes beyond mere denunciation of contradictions to identify those critical points where action should be taken.

In the case of employees’ training capability in French firms, such a critical point is the place given to individual voice at the workplace and its articulation with the collective voice mediated by trade-unions and other representative bodies, a problem that raises the broader issue of the governance of the capitalist firm (Knudsen et al., 2011, Zimmermann, 2012; Borzeix et al., 2015). As a matter of fact, the prescriptions with regard to freedom and responsibility of the most recent French training reforms collide with two central pillars of labor law, namely subordination and representation. Indeed, nothing is more problematic for an employee than the freedom to choose and achieve, since as an employee she remains a subordinate. Inquiries addressing jointly the normative foundations of agency and their concrete conditions allow us to address how people in different positions and situations are able to deal or not with these tensions. It is thus by integrating people’s own values and aspirations into the logic of inquiry that critical pragmatism opens a road for rethinking the challenge of combining individual and collective voice at the workplace and, more broadly, for articulating a social critique that gives expression to pluralism (Jaeggi, 2014: 30 ff.).

However, putting emphasis on the decisive role of inquiry and its methodological design does not place the researcher in the position of impartial observer. The double normative and descriptive dimension of the capability concept – as a desirable normative goal and as a descriptive concept that allows decomposing freedom into subcategories suited for assessing the outcomes of liberal social policies as measured against their own normative framework that makes freedom their yardstick – this double dimension makes it important to clarify one’s position and how one relates to the normative facet of the capability concept. In other words, one must know where the normative source of the critique is to be found – whether that be in the researcher’s own views concerning justice and the good life (like critical theory addressing normativity primarily from the perspective of the observer), in the field of inquiry itself (like critical pragmatism addressing normativity in the first instance from the perspective of the involved actors), or in that space created by their overlap. Critical pragmatism, as defined by a logic of practical inquiry, opens different roads for relating to one’s research object and getting involved in public debates, i.e. as a citizen who is part of a broader public concerned by a given subject-matter and involved in a process of inquiry and valuation aiming to solve the problem (Dewey, 1991), or as an observer aiming to contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the contradictions proper to this subject-matter. These two options do not necessarily exclude each other – they even overlap to a certain point. In both cases, the logic of practical inquiry – jointly normative and factual – comes first, but the ways of engaging with ‘public sociology’ (Burawoy, 2005) and bridging the researcher’s and citizen’s commitments may vary significantly. Therefore the positioning of the researcher in relation to his object appears to be a key issue for critical pragmatism. A strong anchoring of critical sociology in the logic of inquiry does not reduce the need for reflexivity – to the contrary, it makes it all the more imperative.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Jean-Michel Bonvin, Jean De Munck, Roberto Frega, Nikola Tietze and two anonymous reviewers for their stimulating comments and insights with respect to former versions of this article.

Funding

In its early stage, this research has benefited from support by the fifth and sixth European Framework Programs (Eurocap: Contract HPSE-CT-2002-00132; and Capright: Contract CIT4-CT-2006-028549).

Notes

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