The Agency Gap:
Capabilities for a Work–Life Balance
Across Welfare States and
Within Work Organizations
Brussels, 17 June 2011
Social Politics.
International Studies in
Gender, State and Society
Vol. 18, Issue 2, Summer 2011
Sen’s Capabilities and Agency
Framework Applied to Work–
Life Balance Across European
Welfare States and Within Work
Organizations
Edited by Barbara Hobson, Sonja
Drobnıč and Colette Fagan
Authors:
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Nevenka Černigoj Sadar
Laura den Dulk
Sonja Drobnič
Colette Fagan
Susanne Fahlén
Ana M. Guillén
Barbara Hobson
Aleksandra Kanjuo Mrčela
Suzan Lewis
Bram Peper
Janet Smithson
Judit Takács
Anneke van Doorne-Huiskes
Pierre Walthery
My Task: Present the general framework
-- Why: Sen’s framework provides the theoretial
space to capture the dynamics and tensions
within WLB
-- How: I will present model adapted from Sen’s
formulation of the the capabilities set
-- Future: Capabilities and agency framework:
implications for new research and policy agendas
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WLB: Normative concept for quality life
• WLB trade off between and money (utility)
• Demand resource models
***Within Capabilities Framework: WLB as quality
of life and wellbeing
An evaluative space: assessing how policies and
their implementation enhance or weaken quality
of life WLB in a European context
The Agency/Capabilities Gap in WLB:
palpable expression of tensions
• Rising expectations aspirations/ of parents for
WLB and their capabilities for achieving it.
--ESS Attitudinal survey: reconciliation priority
--- Majority of men want to reduce hours, even if it
meant a loss of pay (CEE exception).
• Emergence of rights and policies for WLB and the
ability to exercise them
Extent of gap: Dependent upon Nat’l policy
frameworks, mediated through firms/workplaces
and translated into individual lives and
households.
Agency Gap: Theoretical space in
Capabilities agency Approach
• --It asks us to consider not just what individuals
can do, but their opportunities to be and do”
• Not what one would choose, but what are the
possibilities to choose a life that one values or
choose among different ways of living.
• Agency inequalities: Rising expectations and
norms for men and women to become carers and
earners and the universe of constraints: the
economic, social and normative barriers that
they encounter.
Capabilities and Agency Survey
Hungary and Sweden
• Subjective cognitive level:
--what individuals could refuse, extra or asocial hours
--what are the obtacles that stand in the way?
• Institutional contexts not only shape alternatives parents
might choose, but what they could imagine
Hungary: wide agency gap
-- gender naturalized roles
--precariousness and economic uncertainty
Sweden: Strong sense of entitlement for WLB claims
---Insitutionally embedded, over decades
How capabilities: Capabilities Set
--set of dimensions for the potential of individuals to
achieve a value that is valued (WLB).
---We modify and adapt Sen’s capabilities set to a
European Context
--Our model reveals interaction and interplay:
--nesting individual means and resources within
intitutional contextual, and societal normative
factors
Capability Set for WLB in a European Context
Challenges: Capabilities and Agency
Gap in WLB
--What are possibilities for choosing alternative
ways of living?
Substantive freedoms: institutional factors,
cultural normative constraints
--Beyond income inequalities/agency inequalities
--Beyond outcomes to processes
• Analytical purchase on WLB research:
Fertility decline, Work-life conflict; men’s low take
up rates for parental rights
Looking to the Future
• What are the implications of the
widening capabilities and agency
gap across European countries:
global economic pressures Euro
crisis?
WLB Optimal
outcome
Family well
being
Productivity/
Efficiency
Gender equality