Towards Analysing Individual Working Lives in a Resources/Capabilities Perspective

This collective paper aims at presenting the current state of conceptual and methodological reflection pursued within the Work Package 3 in the CAPRIGHT research agenda that has the ambition to examine the impact of social and labour market policies on the contrasting realities found in individual working lives. The starting point is built out two analytical frames. The first section deals with the central notions of Sen’s capability approach – resources, capabilities and functionings - and the developments in the field of working lives. The focus is put on the way to address time within a dynamic approach of capabilities, and on how to operationalise this approach in order to assess real freedom of choice in individual’s actions. The second section presents the resource regime framework as a political understanding of the wage-welfare nexus defined by the institutional forms of resources flowing through the wage. Resource regimes identify societal configurations of rights over resources that are constitutive of social groups and evolve in relation to changes in employment relations. The centrality of resources and public policies makes the bridge between the two approaches. However, a longitudinal perspective is required to deal with individual working lives. In this way, the third section reviews the perspective developed by life course research and discusses ideas on how to link it with the CAPRIGHT analytical grids. Developed as a sociological theory of social structure or individual action, the life course approach provides key concepts to analyse changes in individual’s trajectories. While standardization of social integration through employment and salary secured quite homogeneous social rights in the “fordist” period, de-standardization, differentiation and pluralization imply both the diversification of rights and entitlements and the diversification of the origin of resources. Finally, the fourth section sketches out the methodological issues related to our research perspective, with a specific attention to longitudinal approach and the combination of quantitative and qualitative data.