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Journal of Human Development and

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Capabilities, Contributive Injustice and

Unequal Divisions of Labour
Andrew Sayer
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 Journal of Human Development and Capabilities
Vol. 13, No. 4, November 2012

Capabilities, Contributive Injustice and

Unequal Divisions of Labour
ANDREW SAYER
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Andrew Sayer is Professor of Social Theory and Political Economy in the

Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

Abstract It is argued that the radical implications of the capabilities

approach have been widely overlooked, primarily because of a tendency for
the approach to be combined with inadequate theories of society, particularly
regarding the external conditions enabling or limiting capabilities. While the
approach is accepted in principle, by turning to the theory of contributive
justice, which focuses on what people are allowed or expected to contribute
in terms of work, paid or unpaid, we can see that job shortages and unequal
divisions of labour are a major cause of capability inequalities and deficiencies.
In so doing the theory helps us to appreciate the radical implications of the
capabilities approach.

Key words: Capabilities, Capability approach, Economic development,

Inequality, Well-being

Introduction
The capabilities approach initiated by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum has
enjoyed extraordinary influence, evident not only in the volume of academic
literature it has spawned but in its impact on development theory and prac-
tice, and in many other areas of social policy too, such as education and
child development. It provides an attractive way of thinking about what we
might aim for in promoting human well-being. Like any idea whose time
has come, it is not only intuitively attractive, but open to different interpret-
ations and hence susceptible to adoption by a wide range of interests.
While in general I support the capabilities approach, I want to argue that its
radical implications are mostly being missed, largely on account of attempts
to use its normative theory without an adequate account of the social struc-
tures that enable or limit human capabilities in particular situations. This
invites a focus on symptoms rather than causes, and a dilution of the approach
and its implications by policy makers, so that despite the radical potential of
the concept of capabilities, the status quo is not threatened by it. In particular
I argue that the effects of labour markets and the division of labour between
ISSN 1945-2829 print/ISSN 1945-2837 online/12/040580-17 # 2012 Human Development and Capability Association
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19452829.2012.693069
 Capabilities and Contributive Injustice

good- and poor-quality kinds of work in constraining the capabilities achiev-

able by workers are in danger of being overlooked.
The capabilities approach (CA) acknowledges that whether capabilities
are realized in any given situation depends on complex social processes and
arrangements, including the external conditions in which people act, but as
a would-be universal normative theory it understandably does not concern
itself centrally with what causes capabilities to be present or absent in any
given situation. This might not be problematic if those who adopt CA in
such situations combine it with searching social scientific analyses of the
context and the mechanisms that support or limit capabilities. However,
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two things tend to militate against this.

Firstly, there is the contemporary academic division of labour, in which,
on the one side, we have political philosophy, a discipline that develops soph-
isticated normative theories of justice but leaves the explanation of social pro-
cesses to the positive empirical social sciences. There is also the tendency in
much political philosophy to immediately abstract from social structures and
relations of domination, and frame its thinking in terms of adult individuals in
an apparently structureless society having responsibility but different
resources, tastes, preferences and luck.1 On the other side, much contempor-
ary social science does not consider normative thinking to be part of its job.
Indeed, some practitioners regard such thinking as dependent on merely sub-
jective values, and as threatening to scientific objectivity. Consequently, they
are often poor at thinking about human development and well-being (Sayer,
2011). This academic division of labour has emerged gradually over the last
200 years. The Enlightenment thinkers and their immediate heirs predated
it, freely mixing positive analysis, evaluation and sometimes prescription in
their work. The consequences of the subsequent divorce are unfortunate
for both sides of the division. The problems I identify in the application of
the capabilities approach are partly a symptom of this more general situation.
The second source of inadequate approaches to capability deficiencies
and inequality is a common naivety, particularly on the normative side of
the division of academic labour in philosophy, about the position of govern-
ment and policy-making in contemporary society, in which these are rep-
resented as neutral, benevolent managers likely to respond simply to
reason. This view ignores political economic power, such as the power of
global financial capital to penalize any state that acts in a way it sees as
harmful to its interests (Leys, 2001).2 This myth is of course one in which gov-
ernments are likely to collude, and academics seeking a sympathetic ear in
policy circles have to do so too to some extent.
In this article I want to introduce an analysis of some of the external
determinants of the presence or absence of capabilities: the labour market
and the unequal division of labour. I will do this via a novel normative
theory—that of ‘contributive justice’. Like the capabilities approach, this
has Aristotelian features, in particular an emphasis on what people are able
to do as a major determinant of their well-being or ill-being. However,
where the capabilities approach abstracts from actual forms of social
581
 A. Sayer

organization, the idea of contributive justice has been developed in closer

relation to social scientific research on relevant social structures and pro-
cesses. In particular, it focuses on how labour markets and an unequal division
of labour create structural inequalities that restrict the capabilities of many
workers, frustrating efforts to improve well-being via approaches that target
personal, internal capabilities. It therefore serves as an illustration of the
importance of analysing the external conditions of capabilities. More gener-
ally, it demonstrates the benefits of breaking down the academic division of
labour between normative theory and positive social science.
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The capabilities approach: strengths, weaknesses and

susceptibility to dilution
The capabilities approach has provided a highly attractive, humanistic vision
of what constitutes development, and relatedly, how we might best under-
stand equality. At its core are several compelling principles: (i) that economic
resources are a not an end in themselves but one of several means to the end
of human well-being—they are necessary but far from sufficient in enabling
people to flourish; (ii) that human development and well-being depend on
being able to have and do a number of different things, for example not
only to have adequate food and shelter but to be able to move freely from
place to place, to participate in social life without stigma, to have an education
and to be free from violence; (iii) the liberal idea that while it is important that
individuals have genuine access to these beings or doings (‘functionings’) they
should also have the freedom not to choose them. Though their terminology
differs, both Sen (1999) and Nussbaum (2000) acknowledge that whether
individuals have certain capabilities depends not only on their personal
capacities, their skills and competences and so on, but on the external con-
ditions in which they find themselves, the norms, institutions and social struc-
tures that provide the setting of their actions and influence their ideas and
actions. It is the external conditions enabling and constraining capabilities
on which I wish to focus.
As a universalist theory, the capabilities approach is deliberately vague, so
the detailed content can be open to democratic debate and cultural interpret-
ation and hence applied in diverse contexts. Sen (1999) abstains from provid-
ing a list of capabilities so as not to pre-empt such debate. Even Nussbaum,
who does propose such a list of particular capabilities (while calling for it
to be subject to cross-cultural evaluation), defends it as part of a ‘thick,
vague’ conception of human flourishing—thick in the sense that flourishing
has many components, and vague in the sense that each capability is
defined sufficiently openly to allow it to be related to culturally specific
interpretations and practices (Nussbaum, 2000). But while this vagueness is
indeed defensible for these reasons, it also creates scope for more casual
and indeed opportunistic appropriations and interpretations.
582
 Capabilities and Contributive Injustice

Some critics have argued that the approach neglects power, and struc-
tural inequalities. Hartley Dean (2009) describes capitalism as ‘the elephant
in the room’ in literature on capabilities (see also J. Cameron, 2000; Carpenter,
2009; Holland, 2008; Navarro, 2000; Sandbrook, 2000). Sandbrook (2000)
describes Sen’s Development as Freedom (1999) as an eloquent defence of
‘pragmatic neoliberalism’, treating markets as natural, and failing to acknowl-
edge Polanyi’s (1944) distinction between markets and market society, ignor-
ing the special character of fictitious commodities, particularly wage labour.
He claims that Sen combines a radical rhetoric of well-being with conservative
economic policy. As some of these critics acknowledge, these are objections
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not to CA as a normative theory but to the way in which CA has been inter-
preted and applied, and to the positive theories with which it has been
coupled. But CA can be combined with quite different theories of society
(see also Robeyns, 2005). As we shall see, it is not difficult to combine CA
with an understanding of power, class and other axes of domination in
ways that support radical conclusions which many of the existing policy
makers and advisors who favour CA would find alarming.
While the emphasis on capabilities (the freedom of individuals to achieve
basic beings and doings) rather than functionings (what they actually have and
do) is defensible, it is vital to distinguish merely formal possibilities from realiz-
able ones. In particular, it is important to distinguish zero-sum situations that
only allow some to achieve certain capabilities at the expense of others from
situations that allow all who want those capabilities to achieve them simul-
taneously. Familiar ‘equality of opportunity’ discourses tend to pass off the
former as equivalent to the latter and fail to challenge the reproduction of struc-
tural inequalities that cause capability deficits (Walby, 2009). Furthermore,
social structures such as the labour market may not only have a zero-sum char-
acter but also involve relations of domination and exploitation. As Timothy
Hinton puts it, we should think not only about ‘what x is able to do and to
be’, but also ‘what is x able to get others to do or be?’ (Hinton, 2006, p. 108).
The understandable tendency of philosophers and other normative the-
orists seeking universal proposals to abstract from the particular, contingent
social structures present in particular societies can easily allow, by default,
an emphasis on individuals’ ‘internal capabilities’, as Nussbaum calls them,
such as creative ability, or the capacity for participation in social life, at the
expense of the external conditions or options necessary for their exercise.
To be sure, the acquisition of the former is affected by external conditions,
but even if the internal capabilities are achieved, for example through edu-
cational provision, opportunities for using those acquired powers may be
restricted. The tendency to imagine that training skilled workers produces
skilled jobs for them to fill is a common, though scarcely innocent, delusion
in the discourse of the ‘knowledge-based economy’. Thus the tendency to
elaborate internal capabilities but not the external conditions of their achieve-
ment easily becomes complicit in neoliberal discourses that attempt to shift
responsibility from the state to individuals and from welfare to workfare
(Peck, 2001).3
583
 A. Sayer

Clearly, it is one thing to set out the basic elements of individual flourish-
ing but another thing to determine what forms of social organization enable
the condition of the flourishing of each individual to be the flourishing of
all. The Equalities Review Panel’s report, published in Britain in 2007 (Equal-
ities Review Panel, 2007), is a striking example of this. Having explicitly
endorsed Sen’s capability approach and formulated its own list of capabilities,
it ignores structural external conditions and treats inequality as an accidental
residual feature of British society, caused simply by prejudice, stereotyping,
inadequate policies and ‘complacency’. Its understanding of the structural
causes of inequality is lamentable.
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Let us now examine an argument that confronts some of the key social
structures that constrain capabilities.

External conditions: constraints on contributive justice

As with the capabilities approach, the focus of the concept of ‘contributive
justice’, as Paul Gomberg terms it, is on what people are able to do and be
rather than on the resources they get; it concerns justice with regard to
what people are allowed or required to do (Gomberg, 2007). Both share an
Aristotelian provenance, together with influences from the early Marx’s
writing on work.
As one of the most important things that people do or contribute, in
many cases taking up much of their lives, the quantity and quality of work
(paid or unpaid) has a profound effect on us and the kind of people we
become. Work is or can be more than merely a means by which we provision
ourselves. While it is often treated negatively in economics as simply a cost or
burden, it may, depending on its character, enable us to use and develop our
senses, skills and powers, to relate to others and indeed be a good in itself
rather than merely a means to other ends. In addition to the intrinsic qualities
of the activity, be they good or bad, the kind of work we do also affects the
recognition that we get from others. This may range from respect to con-
tempt, and can in turn have significant effects on individuals’ self-respect
and self-esteem.
Through the very process of work as well as via its products, work can
contribute significantly to the realization of most of the capabilities in
Martha Nussbaum’s list. In particular, it enables or restricts:

1. The use of ‘the senses, imagination and thought’, including ‘being able to
use one’s mind in ways protected by guarantees of freedom of expression’
(Nussbaum, 2000, p. 79). These vary particularly with the skills and indi-
vidual discretion allowed by jobs, and the power of employees relative
to that of employers. For example, jobs that allow workers little or no dis-
cretion—whether because they are limited by machinery so the worker
becomes an appendage of the machine or because they are under constant
surveillance and micro-management—not only block the achievement of
584
 Capabilities and Contributive Injustice

capabilities but are likely to have long-term effects on mental and physical
health (Marmot, 2004).
2. Having the social bases of respect and non-humiliation (‘in work, being
able to work as a human being, exercising practical reason and entering
into meaningful relationships of mutual recognition with other workers’
[Nussbaum, 2000, pp. 79– 80]). Again this is strongly affected by the
material character and social organization of the work. In the case of
low status service work involving direct contact with the public, pressure
to conform to scripts and to acquiesce to customers’ or clients’ demands
may block ‘relationships of mutual recognition’ with them.
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3. Being able to participate effectively in political choices that govern one’s

life, and enjoy free speech. This is a rarity in employment; democracy
usually stops at the workplace door.

In combination, restrictions of these capabilities, which are likely to be worse

at the bottom of workplace hierarchies, may cause health problems, particu-
larly through stress (Marmot, 2004).
Whether work facilitates or blocks the achievement of capabilities
depends firstly on its quantity. To be prevented from working or required to
work excessive hours inevitably impacts on our capabilities, both in terms
of the implications for the resources we get and the time available for other
activities, and of the effect of the work or lack of work itself. Secondly, the
implications for capabilities depend on the quality of work. It may be pleasant,
interesting, satisfying and socially useful, or unpleasant, stressful, tedious,
mind-dulling and seemingly pointless. It may be a source of sociality, dignity
and recognition, or it may be solitary, demeaning and despised, merely a
source of money. Sometimes, of course, jobs combine good and bad qualities,
but in a modern division of labour the net quality of particular jobs does not
equalize out on the whole. On balance, some jobs are much better than others
for providing capabilities.
Whether individuals work, and what kind of work they do, depends not
simply on choice but on how work tasks of different qualities are divided up
and distributed among them. While ‘contributive justice’ is an unfamiliar
term, the concept is familiar. When a member of a team complains that
some members are not pulling their weight, and hence free-riding on the
efforts of others, she is expressing a sense of contributive injustice. It is
common to expect individuals in such contexts to contribute what they
can, taking into account their ability and other constraints; the contributions
do not have to be equal, as long as the inequalities are justifiable in terms of
such differences. Since it concerns the amount of work that people do, we
can call this a quantitative form of contributive justice. It is to this that the
first part of the Marxist slogan (‘from each according to their ability, to each
according to their need’) alludes. The focus of this article is on this contribu-
tive side, although I will comment briefly on the distributive side at times.
In the case of paid work, the structural job shortages common in local
labour markets that have experienced major disinvestment mean that it is
585
 A. Sayer

impossible for some jobseekers to find employment in those places. In such

cases, if an individual jobseeker improves her skills and qualifications (and
develops her internal capabilities), she can only find employment on the con-
dition that another jobseeker fails to get a job. Such job shortages are a struc-
tural source of quantitative contributive injustice. In the UK, for over a
decade, neoliberal governments have avoided acknowledging this and have
chosen instead to hold the unemployed responsible for their unemployment
and to exhort them, in effect, to find a job by improving their internal capabili-
ties by seeking training (Clarke, 2005; Grover, 2010; Peck, 2001). Of course,
some may succeed in doing so, but to infer from this that all the structurally
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employed can do so simultaneously involves a fallacy of composition.

Marx’s critique of capitalist and rentier profits, and the critiques of rentier
income developed by Hobson, Tawney and Keynes, bring together concerns
about quantitative contributive justice and distributive justice. Their critiques
are not directed merely at inequalities in distribution but at the ability of those
who control existing assets (means of production, land, shares) to free-ride on
the surplus of goods provided by those who have to work for a living, and
hence to rely on exploitation of the contributions of others. But it is the quali-
tative kind of contributive justice that I want to devote most attention to, as
this is less commonly a target of critiques of economic injustice.
When a team member complains that some members are monopolizing
the more pleasant or interesting tasks, leaving the unpleasant and tedious
ones to others, she is identifying a qualitative form of contributive justice.
In households, as research on the domestic division of labour shows,
women typically not only do more housework than men (a quantitative con-
tributive injustice), but to the extent that men do any, they tend to choose the
less tedious tasks (a qualitative contributive injustice). Both kinds of injustice
are a common source of conflict within households. Part of the feminist argu-
ment against these gendered inequalities is that they restrict women’s oppor-
tunities for self-development; in effect they allow men to enlarge some of their
capabilities at the expense of women’s. It also handicaps women’s partici-
pation in public life in general and the labour market in particular (e.g. Cromp-
ton, 2007; Delphy and Leonard, 1992; Folbre, 1982; Hochschild, 1989; Oakley,
1974; Okin, 1989; Walby, 1986, 1990). This is one of the reasons men are over-
represented in higher paid, higher status jobs, and women in lower paid,
lower status jobs.
While this gendered vertical segregation and the associated gender pay
gap is widely recognized, the problem is generally seen as wholly reducible
to one of gender. However, imagine a society in which this gendered segre-
gation has been eliminated so that men and women (and by the same
token, people of different ethnicity) are equally represented at all levels.
This would certainly be a fairer society, but there would still be qualitative
contributive injustice, since the more interesting and fulfilling and higher
status work tasks would still be monopolized by a minority, leaving the
more tedious and unpleasant ones to others. Yet while people are generally
highly sensitive to contributive injustice within teams, and while it is a
586
 Capabilities and Contributive Injustice

well-known source of domestic conflict, most people—including social scien-

tists—do not even notice it in the wider formal economy, where it is institu-
tionalized and naturalized in what may be termed the unequal division of
labour. This is a historically specific form of work organization, in which
the more interesting, skilled and high status tasks are separated out from
low-quality tasks, and segregated into different jobs.4 By contrast, an equal div-
ision of labour would be one in which each job incorporated a variety of work
of different qualities, with workers rotating between them (Murphy, 1993),
thus achieving qualitative contributive justice. This need not be like Marx’s
pre-industrial vision in which divisions of labour are overcome altogether.
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There could still be different sectors, like food processing, health services
and transport, but within each sector, each job would contain a mix of
work qualities, so that for example all workers did some low-skilled work
such as cleaning for some days or weeks of the year, and higher-skilled and
more interesting work at other times.5
As Gomberg argues, where an unequal division of labour exists, the only
equality of opportunity that exists has a competitive, zero-sum form. Even if all
job seekers were equally highly qualified, there would not be enough high-
quality jobs to go round, so only some could get them, and then only if
others didn’t get them and ended up in lower-quality jobs. The inequalities
are structural—products of the unequal division of labour rather than
merely of unequal individual ability or skill, or products of prejudice. Equality
of opportunity in this context merely implies discrimination-free competition
for unequal opportunities.
One of the reasons for the lack of evident public concern about this struc-
tural form of qualitative contributive injustice is that its source—the unequal
division of labour—tends to segregate the employed population into different
strata and occupations, each of which provides individuals with an important
reference group with which to compare their situation. Thus individual
doctors are most likely to assess the kind of work they are allowed or required
to do in comparison with their peers, rather than in comparison with recep-
tionists, secretaries or cleaners. If one doctor in a medical practice finds that
she is expected to do more tedious tasks than colleagues at the same level, she
is likely to feel aggrieved, but the fact that the cleaners have much more
boring work is unlikely to trouble her. This is just one way in which the
unequal division of labour tends to produce effects that lead to its acceptance.
There are two common justifications of the unequal division of labour: by
appeal to its alleged efficiency benefits, and by appeal to the argument that the
division merely reflects differences in individual abilities. As regards the
former, these efficiencies tend to be exaggerated, as the critiques of Taylorism
and Fordism showed (Beynon and Nichols, 2006). Excessive division of labour
within organizations causes communication problems and difficulties in
solving problems and reducing waste. As James Murphy (1993) points out,
specialization of tasks through division of work need not require a corre-
sponding specialization of workers for they may be able to rotate, and
indeed rotation mitigates precisely those problems of Taylorism and
587
 A. Sayer

Fordism (Sayer, 1989). It would, in any case, be naı̈ve to imagine that the
unequal division of labour is merely a product of the pursuit of efficiencies,
for it is also significantly a product of closure mechanisms, that is, struggles
of those in relatively powerful positions to hoard good-quality tasks while off-
loading low-quality tasks onto others (Tilly, 1998). The history of professions
and skill and demarcation disputes bears witness to this. It is also a product, as
Marx saw, of capital’s struggle to prevent worker resistance. We might
concede that some highly skilled tasks, such as those of complex surgery,
require years of training and full-time involvement by particular individuals,
who cannot be expected to do much else (though even here we might ques-
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tion whether they should be completely relieved of mundane tasks such as

housework or form-filling). More importantly, to the extent that the unequal
division of labour does produce efficiency benefits, we have to ask whether
this trumps the need for all individuals to have work that allows them to
achieve capabilities. Here it should be remembered that one of the strengths
of the capabilities approach is that it prioritizes the capabilities of the individ-
ual, challenging utilitarian justifications implicit in efficiency arguments.
The argument that the unequal division of labour is merely a response to
differences in intelligence and ability has been challenged since the eight-
eenth century. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote:

The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much

less than we are aware of; and the very different genius which
appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown
up in maturity, is not upon many occasions so much the cause, as
the effect of the division of labour. The difference between the
most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common
street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from
nature, as from habit, custom, and education. (Smith, 1776/1976,
Bk I, ch. ii, pp. 19 –20)

Earlier, having analysed the division of labour in the pin factory, Smith
commented:

The man whose whole life is spent performing a few simple oper-
ations . . . has no occasion to exert his understanding . . . He naturally
loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes
as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to
become. (Smith, 1776/1976, 2.V.I., art. 2, pp. 302 –303)

Smith believed that the effects of this deskilled, repetitive work would spill
over into life outside work, stunting the ability of such workers to participate
in the life of the community. Murphy (1993) cites empirical research on the
relation between the intellectual capacities of workers and the cognitive com-
plexity of the work they do, which shows that over a 10-year period the cog-
nitive capacities of workers doing complex jobs developed, while those of
588
 Capabilities and Contributive Injustice

workers doing simple and repetitive work deteriorated. Furthermore, as Smith

feared, there is evidence that ‘[w]orkers in mindless jobs not only undermine
their capacity for the enjoyment of complex activities at work but also their
capacity for the enjoyment of complex activities during leisure’ (Murphy,
1993, p. 7, n. 19).
However, neither Gomberg’s, Murphy’s nor Smith’s critiques of the
unequal division of labour adequately explain how differences in ability,
aptitude and aspirations are produced, given that these develop long before
people are old enough to go into employment. Employment within an
unequal division of labour may make a difference to workers and affect
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their abilities, but young people coming onto the labour market are already
unequal.
Research by Leon Feinstein on children’s cognitive capacities shows that
these develop more slowly in low social class children than in high social class
children, so that by 120 months the brightest of the low social class children
at 22 months are overtaken by the weakest of the high social class children
(Feinstein, 2003). The score at 22 months predicts educational qualifications
at age 26 and is related to family background. The children of educated or
wealthy parents who scored poorly in the early tests had a tendency to
catch up, whereas children of worse-off parents who scored poorly were
extremely unlikely to catch up. Feinstein found no evidence that entry into
schooling reverses this pattern. Not surprisingly, social mobility in all major
capitalist countries is low (Aldridge, 2004; Erikson and Goldthorpe, 1992).
There is abundant sociological research showing how children tend to
develop dispositions, expectations and styles of learning that are attuned to
their family’s position in the social field, which is itself strongly influenced
by the parents’ position in the unequal division of labour. The formation of
these dispositions is an example of what Nussbaum (2000, p. 85) terms ‘com-
bined capabilities’. They require both the development of individual internal
powers (e.g. skills) and the provision of social structures and institutions that
enable that development; indeed, the two are interdependent.
Neuro-plasticity rather than genetic difference is now recognized as the
most salient feature of infant potential. The effect of the unequal division of
labour on what happens to this potential is indirect, shaping the new gener-
ation’s dispositions and expectations by shaping the circumstances and
habitus of their parents (Bourdieu, 1996; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990; Char-
lesworth, 2000; Sayer, 2005; Skeggs, 1997). To generalize, working class lives,
characterized by lack of power, are prefigured in the relatively authoritarian
character of much working class childrearing, which tends to set clear disci-
plinary limits without defending them through elaborate justifications;
theirs is not to reason why any more than their parents are allowed to
reason with their employers. Children are also expected to amuse themselves
rather than interact with adults. By contrast, middle class parenting places
great stress on reasoning, on education and self-development and on talking
to adults (Evans, 2006; Lareau, 2003; Walkerdine and Lucey, 1989). These pre-
figure lives of working in occupations in which they are allowed to use these
589
 A. Sayer

reasoning powers and take decisions, and in which they have more chance of
dealing with professionals and managers as equals. These processes of socia-
lization affect what is registered as individuals’ ‘intelligence’ (Dorling, 2010;
Evans, 2006). Insofar as the unequal division of labour indirectly shapes the
contexts in which the next generation is brought up, it also tends to
produce inequalities in their aspirations and abilities, which appears to legit-
imize the very same unequal division of labour that gives rise to contributive
injustice (Bourdieu, 1984, 1996; Tilly, 1998).
Genuine (rather than zero-sum or competitive) equality of opportunity
for the young requires rough equality of condition for their parents. This in
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turn would require a more equal division of labour. Some may argue that
there is no injustice in a system of competitive equality of opportunity, as
long as there is no discrimination against individuals on irrelevant grounds
such as gender or race. This is sociologically naı̈ve in supposing that
removal of such discrimination is sufficient to create a level playing field,
for winners and losers can scarcely help passing on their advantages and dis-
advantages to their children. The competitive game is not like repeated tosses
of a coin; today’s results strongly affect future outcomes. Merely countering
attitudes and behaviour will not have much impact on those inequalities,
because they are partly a product of the unequal division of labour. Getting
rid of discrimination against particular groups of workers will not produce
genuine equality of opportunity, just more diverse groups of winners and
losers. Tilly makes a similar point:

Mistaken beliefs reinforce exploitation, opportunity hoarding, emu-

lation and adaptation but exercise little independent influence on
their initiation . . . It follows that the reduction or intensification
of racist, sexist, or xenophobic attitudes will have relatively little
impact on durable inequality, whereas the introduction of new
organizational forms . . . will have great impact. (Tilly, 1998, p. 15)

It is striking that while equal opportunity policies typically address discrimi-

nation on grounds of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion and disability,
they often ignore class. But then while organizations might try to avoid class
prejudice in selecting individuals for particular posts, the irony is not just that
specific jobs are associated with particular mixes of cultural and social capital
and hence different kinds of habitus, but that in the very act of defining jobs
with not only widely different pay and conditions but different qualities of
work, they are of course actively reproducing class inequalities. Competitive
equality of opportunity, as Gomberg defines it, does nothing to challenge this
but works entirely within this inegalitarian process.
A more equal division of labour would limit the scope for some groups to
expand their capabilities at the expense of others. Creating a capability ceiling
within the sphere of work would raise the capabilities of those formerly held
back by confinement to low-quality work. Whereas neoliberal discourse vigor-
ously rejects any suggestion that the poor may be poor partly because some
590
 Capabilities and Contributive Injustice

are rich, the contributive justice approach highlights certain instances of such
interdependence.
I realize that it is tempting to dismiss these arguments on the grounds that
the idea of a division of labour in a modern society in which each individual
does work of different qualities seems just too idealistic. While I don’t think
it’s an impossible combination, it’s certainly enormously challenging, not
least to privileged workers such as academics and policy makers. However,
it would be as illogical to dismiss the argument on these grounds as it
would be to refuse to believe in anthropogenic global warming on the
grounds that we can’t face sacrificing our current way of life to cut CO2 emis-
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sions. That the unequal division of labour is a fundamental cause of inequality

and capability deficiencies is another inconvenient truth.
Students of economic justice will no doubt question how, in any assess-
ment of contribution, this should be measured (hours worked? effort? merit?
skill? usefulness of the product to the user?). And how can one isolate one
person’s contribution from that of their workmates, or indeed how can one
assess how much of their contribution is owed to those who have taught
them and cared for them? In addition, there is the problem of how to
compare contributions made by workers using different levels of technology
(Alperovitz and Daly, 2008). There is also the problem of whether differences
in contribution should be reflected in differences in distribution, and if so, how.
In the Marxist prescriptive formula, as in many households, distribution is
disconnected from contribution, being based on need rather than contri-
bution. In a democratically run team, members might make practical judge-
ments using more than one criterion of contribution.6 While the issue of
how to value contributions, particularly of different kinds, is complex, it
does not follow that contributive justice in the form of differences in contri-
bution for which there are no reasonable justifications can be dismissed as
imaginary, especially in the key limit cases of structural quantitative contribu-
tive injustice that we have noted, namely prevention of contribution by job
shortages, and free-riding on others’ contributions through appropriation of
unearned income through control of existing assets. Furthermore, structural
qualitative contributive injustice caused by the unequal division of labour
makes individual contributions qualitatively different, and does so however
one chooses to measure contribution. It is unfair to credit or penalize individ-
uals in such a context for their contribution, especially given the tendency of
pay to vary positively with quality of jobs. Nevertheless, the merits of different
criteria of assessment of contribution remain an issue that the literature on
contributive justice has still to confront.
In practice, in a market economy, as Hayek noted, pay bears little relation
to merit or effort, for prices are not the result of moral decisions about such
matters but outcomes of market processes in which luck and relative scarcities
loom large (Hayek, 1976, p. 74; see also Phelps Brown, 1977). Considerations of
contribution and deserts or merit are backward looking, whereas under capit-
alism, price determination is largely forward looking and aimed at maximiza-
tion of returns. In capitalism, actors get what they can, according to their
591
 A. Sayer

market power, which may or may not coincide with judgements about what
they have contributed and deserve, however that might be conceptualized.
Are the inequalities in contribution that we have discussed an injustice in
themselves or an injustice because of their effect on capabilities? Both. It is an
injustice in itself for some to free-ride on the labour of others and for some to
be able to monopolize good-quality work, leaving inferior work to others. And
job shortages and the unequal division of labour make both internal and exter-
nal capabilities unequal in ways that have no regard for needs or deserts,
however measured.
Marxists may object that this discussion of the unequal division of labour
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has ignored the social relations of capitalism and exploitation, which are argu-
ably more basic to capitalism. However, the two targets of critique are not
mutually exclusive, though we should note that an unequal division of
labour typifies modern non-capitalist organizations too (see Wright, 2000).
And as we argued earlier, Marx’s critique of exploitation focuses both on dis-
tribution and quantitative contributive injustice. Marx’s comments on human
flourishing in his early, more Aristotelian work have influenced the develop-
ment of the capabilities approach itself, as Sen and Nussbaum acknowledge,
though unfortunately they have evaded his critique of capitalist and rentier
exploitation in his later work.7 Further, Marx and Engels’ critique of the div-
ision of mental from manual labour in The German Ideology (1973) prefi-
gures the qualitative contributive justice argument.
Finally, it is worth noting some connections to popular ideas of economic
justice. While there is commonly strong support for a contributive principle
(i.e. each should contribute what they can), there is little understanding of
how the unequal division of labour in the formal economy limits its realization.
This in turn is often linked to support for the idea of distribution according to
deserts, although the extent to which individuals are responsible for their con-
tribution tends to be overestimated (Miller, 1992; 1999; Joseph Rowntree Foun-
dation, 2007, 2009). The naturalization of the unequal division of labour allows
people to believe that inequalities in distribution are a product of differences in
contribution, as if individual contributions were simply a matter of individual
motivation and effort, as if the distribution of work of different qualities were
a reflection of genetic differences in intelligence, plus effort and aspirations,
and as if incomes simply reflected these. This resonates with the popular
‘belief in a just world’, according to which the good are rewarded and the
bad not, so that failure is taken to be the individual’s responsibility (Lerner,
1980). As long as that understanding is not challenged, people are likely to
object to any major equalization of distribution on the grounds that this
would not be fair because some contribute more complex and responsible
labour than others, and hence arguably deserve more.8

Conclusion
This paper accepts CA in principle but argues that its radical implications are
unlikely to be grasped unless we address structural external constraints on the
592
 Capabilities and Contributive Injustice

achievement of inequalities, especially those produced by the labour market

and the unequal division of labour. General expositions of CA tend to abstract
from these external conditions, whether because of individualistic views of
society prevalent in philosophy or simply because of the need to abstract
from local, contingent constraints present in particular cases. By default,
the internal conditions for capabilities in the form of individual development
and capacities tend to come to the fore. This unwittingly fits with the neolib-
eral refusal to acknowledge the impact of social structures, including the
effects of the unequal division of labour, and of neuro-plasticity and the impor-
tance of socialization, and with the complementary belief that individuals are
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or should be responsible for their own development, and that, at best, states
can merely encourage this. In neoliberal hands, CA provides an appealingly
humanistic cover for the neoliberal naturalization of capitalist structures of
domination and exploitation.9 One irony is that if these implications of CA
and contributive justice were widely understood, the CA approach would
be less appealing to dominant interests. Instead of being attractively humanis-
tic in a neutral way that does not identify some of the most important sources
of domination and exclusion, it would pose a threat to the dominant and the
structural inequalities on which they depend. The fact that many adopters of
CA ignore the ‘elephant in the room’ does not mean that we should reject the
concept of capabilities. CA’s strengths in identifying what matters for human
flourishing help us to appreciate just how social structures enable or restrict
well-being. More generally, the contributive justice argument demonstrates
the benefits of breaking down the academic division of labour between nor-
mative theory and positive social science.

Notes
1 For example, subsuming those causes of inequality which are not the product of individual
free choice under the heading of ‘luck’ obscures the nature of these processes, many of
which result from structures of power. Worse, it treats domination and exploitation as equiv-
alent to random events such as accidents or illness, individualizing and depoliticizing them.
2 This is one of Menon’s criticisms of Nussbaum’s discussion of capabilities in relation to India
(Menon, 2002). The rise to prominence of national competitiveness indices and the threat of
capital flight have had an extraordinary disciplining effect on states, increasing the power of
capital to veto democratic decisions and impose austerity measures.
3 While this pattern of emphasis is attractive to dominant interests, educational institutions,
with their commitment to the development of individuals’ capacities, can easily be co-
opted to this neoliberal agenda (Andresen et al., 2010).
4 I am aware that skill is a contested concept and that some skills, especially those associated
with women, are undervalued. Nevertheless, this does not mean that all acknowledged skill
differences are purely illusory.
5 Gomberg (2007) also argues that task rotation makes work more meaningful not only
because it provides variety, but also because it can allow workers to do several tasks that
form interdependent parts of a unified process or project that is comprehensible to the
worker. Doing your own photocopying when you need to do it as part of the completion
of a project is more meaningful than doing everyone else’s photocopying and nothing
else. Again, structural conditions—in this case, job and workplace design—may inhibit or
facilitate the realization of capabilities.

593
 A. Sayer
6 Some university departments construct points systems to measure individual contributions
of teaching, administration and research so they can be roughly equalized (Sayer, 2008)
7 Note that the primary target of Marx and Engels’ early critique of capitalism in The German
Ideology was division of labour rather than class (Marx and Engels, 1973).
8 If distribution were more equal, employers would have a weaker financial incentive to strip
out low-skilled tasks from skilled workers jobs and give them to lower paid workers.
9 British Prime Minister, David Cameron, a graduate of Politics, Philosophy and Economics at
Oxford and son of a rentier, has written a paper on eudaimonia in a collection on well-being
and climate change, in which he skirts round the matter of structural inequality and argues
that it is not government but societies, particularly families, that can improve our lives,
though government can induce individuals and organizations to fulfil their wider social
responsibilities (D. Cameron, 2008).
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