Using Alienation to Understand the Link Between Work and Capabilities

The last five decades have witnessed sociologists formulating various scales to measure and assess the degree of alienation of workers. Critical Marxists, however, argue that de-ideologisation and valueneutrality cannot be seen as desirable properties of a reconceptualization of the Marxian notion of alienation. Most Marxist scholars are not in favour of a comparative-quantitative analysis of Marx's theory of alienation. Nevertheless, Sen situates Marx's theory in the category of those which carry out “realization-focused comparison” (as opposed to “transcendental institutionalism”), by comparing societies that actually exist or may evolve. This paper articulates the need for an operationalization of the concept of alienation in empirical terms and calls for a meaningful dialogue between the capability approach to meaningful work and the emerging and significant body of literature on alienation and capabilities. It argues that alienation, translated to the capability vocabulary as “impairments in responsible agency to attain the capabilities one has reason to value” may also be mapped onto failed social relationships. Even when we do not limit the concept of alienation to the system-anti-system binary, we need to understand it in the context of the failures of economic institutions existing in the contemporary world.