acase@tulane.edu / Abstract This research seeks to further the understanding of female microentrepreneurship as it is conceptualized and applied to initiatives that supporting women’s economic and social empowerment. Social norms, institutional discrimination, and gender constraints define the activities and persons that are entrepreneurial, thereby affecting female microenterprise motivations, characteristics, and success. In addition, contemporary microenterprise initiatives draw on women’s stereotypical caret-taking roles to justify their economic development, while female microenterprises remain distinguishable by their informality, small size, and low returns. The enterprises created through resource allocation programs, such as microcredit, are largely informal and home-based subsistence enterprises that offer a low-quality employment option to women and fail to challenge or expand existing gender constraints. Data from focus group participants and analysis of survey responses from 487 female microentrepreneurs in Kandy, Sri Lanka are used to compare female microentrepreneurial success in terms of both financial and empowerment outcomes. A novel conceptualization of the capabilities approach is presented and utilized to build an original analytical framework that redefines success in terms of women’s capabilities: whether female microentrepreneurship expands what they can be and do. An iterative approach to defining success outcomes establishes that adding empowerment indicators to definitions of success highlight different gender constraints to female microentrepreneurship than purely financial measures. Group differences provide an analysis of the gender constraints that are more prevalent among those meeting compound definitions of success and those who do not. A logistic regression of gender constraints, including personal household, and business characteristics, and women’s capabilities (as a proxy for empowerment), determines the impact of each constraint on the likelihood of being successful. The results suggest that, at the microenterprise level, female entrepreneurs are constrained by social and household norms that reduce their capabilities and enterprise success. Women’s hybrid entrepreneurial motivations, driven by their own economic and household considerations rather than outcomes desired by development initiatives, are established as offering fertile ground for future research, specifically regarding the impact of the household context. It is suggested that the motivations are distinct from those of women operating larger SMEs and require specific attention / 1 / Melissa E Langworthy

The concept of accessibility (hereafter “accessibility”) encapsulates the relationships between the availability of opportunities; an individual's ability to access, engage with and ‘benefit' from such opportunities, and; the problem of social exclusion. However, while “improving accessibility” has been a policy objective in the United Kingdom since 1997, an emphasis on economic and environmental considerations at the expense of social considerations has become a cause for concern. This thesis helps address that concern by exploring why and how accessibility should and could be made more directly relevant to people's everyday lives; and by proposing a form of and an approach to the implementation of accessibility that supports the provision of social interventions, irrespective of the origin and scale of the same. Consequently, this thesis critically reviews extant ideas of accessibility and redefines the concept using Amartya Sen's Capabilities Approach. It then explores the operationalization of that redefined concept through an action research case study in North-East Scotland. Finally, it examines the potential role of digital information and communication technology (ICT) in managing the accessibility related data needed to support decision taking in providing social interventions. The key findings are: (1) the capabilities approach enables the redefinition of accessibility as a holistic, more socially representative and agent centric concept; (2) that definition could be usefully related to the concept of social exclusion through the notion of risk; (3) this emerging theory and practise of accessibility requires further development to achieve broader acceptance; (4) that notwithstanding the philosophical arguments underpinning action research, the participation of ‘local' people in research can build stronger, more informed and productive (research) relationships, and; (5) the use of digital ICT is central to realising the full potential of accessibility.

Human enhancements will dramatically alter individuals' capabilities and lead to serious harm if unregulated. However, it is unclear how states should act to mitigate this harm. I argue that the capabilities approach provides a useful metric to determine what action states should take regarding each enhancement technology. According to the capabilities approach, states are responsible for ensuring their citizens are able to function in certain ways that are essential to human life. I consider the impact of a range of enhancements on individuals' capabilities in order to determine what actions states should take regarding each technology. I find that in order to be just and prevent harmful inequality, states will need to ensure many enhancements are available to their citizens. I also explore a range of other regulations aimed at harm prevention. Considering the impact of enhancement technologies on human capabilities, and the appropriate regulatory options for states, under the guide of the capabilities approach allows me to demonstrate that the capabilities approach can provide valuable, realistic, advice to guide public policy in response to enhancement technologies.

This research is an application of the Capabilities Approach to a southern educational context, aiming to answer how children’s capabilities differ across different types of schooling (public, private and religious) in Pakistan. While conventional research on education in the country dwells on aspects like economic returns to education or qualitative differences in public and private provision, a broader perspective addressing the institutionalization of a tier-ed education structure and its consequences for school-going children remains missing. The current study is an incubation of the same perspective; it asks: how do primary school going children’s educational capabilities differ across different types of schooling in Pakistan?, and by re-framing the question of education equality as a capabilities one, sheds light on appropriate ways of conceptualizing and measuring educational capabilities in a developing country context. Since the use of capabilities with respect to Pakistan’s school diversity is an innovative research area, it justifies the choice of a mixed-methods research design. The qualitative phase comprises focus groups with children and their parents aimed at balancing universal lists of educational capabilities with local insights. The quantitative phase involves a capabilities questionnaire for children built using both theoretical and local valuations as well as a household survey to obtain richer information on each child participant. Qualitative findings for the study reflect on contextualized dimensions of theoretically relevant educational capabilities as well as two new capability categories – Religion and Values and Etiquettes – valued by participants. Quantitative findings for the study discuss (i) differences in children’s educational capabilities across school types in Pakistan, and (ii) the individual, family and household factors potentially explaining such variation. Together, the two sets of findings highlight the complexities in development and evaluation of educational capabilities amidst school diversity in Pakistan and reveal important conclusions for the country’s education policy planning and development.

This thesis explores the strength of the two major theories of punishment, consequentialism and retributivism. It also explores the two most critiqued systems of punishment in the world: The U.S and Norway. By presenting the idea that retributivism is the only plausible theory that can morally justify the U.S. penal practises, I argue against the theory by incorporating various objections delivered by Antony Duff, Michael Zimmerman, and Jeffrie Murphy. I then explore the question of what could possibly ground the Norwegian justice system, for the answer to this is crucial, if we hope to demand prison reform and tailor our systems to resemble the Norwegian ideal. To answer this question, I present a theory that incorporates the ‘capabilities approach’ as developed by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, arguing that the Norwegian prison system is grounded in a hybrid theory of consequentialism that aims to enhance our human rights.

In Latin America, the debate on what constitutes a 'good' or 'bad' job has been dominated by the phenomenon of informality. Indicators like the 'informal sector size' or the proportion of workers in 'informal employment' give little attention to the intrinsic features of jobs that affect workers' well-being, thus misleading policy efforts. Validation of alternative and comparable human-centred measures of job quality (JQ) is needed. This study aims to evaluate the validity of a multi-dimensional measure of JQ in developing countries, and its usefulness against narrow indicators of formality/informality. To this end, Sen's capability-approach is used along with Green and Mostafa's operationalisation of JQ (Eurofound, 2012), which considers dimensions as varied as earnings, career prospects, autonomy, intensity, social environment, physical environment, and working time. With Central America as the research setting, I address four questions: (1) does Eurofound's indicator capture JQ inequalities at the individual level? (2) Can we draw meaningful comparisons between countries about their ability to provide good jobs? (3) Are the selected features of what constitutes a good job positively associated with Central American workers' well-being? (4) Is the concept of JQ attuned with what local experts conceive as a 'good job'? The research uses a mixed-methods approach to analyse the First Central American Survey on Working Conditions and Health - conducted in 2011 in Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala - in addition to semi-structured interviews with selected informants from these six countries. The results obtained show, firstly, a reasonable distribution of JQ across groups of workers. They confirm that formal jobs are not ubiquitously the best quality jobs. Secondly, the results evidenced significant variation at the country level regarding earnings and intrinsic job quality, with Costa Rica often ranking at the top. Interestingly, JQ rankings do not always follow from countries' industrial structure, economic performance, informal sector size, or other developmental indicators of common usage; country differences in JQ appear associated with the practical enforcement capacity of labour institutions like trade unions, inspection systems, and the state itself. Thirdly, I corroborated that the selected job features have a positive impact on Central American workers' well-being (except, puzzlingly, for work-time related aspects). Moreover, the positive health effect associated with performing in an intrinsically good job proved to be greater than the effect of working formally. Lastly, I confirmed that local perspectives about what constitutes a 'good job' are in great part consistent with the features included in Green and Mostafa's JQ scheme, while other intrinsic dimensions of the framework have struggled to enter the public discourse. These findings indicate that a JQ framework is generally valid in the Central American context, and provides more information than a conventional indicator of informality. The study contributes to extend the capability approach to the realm of work and to stress its potential for international comparative research. It is recommended that countries collect richer data about those aspects of jobs that have been proven to affect workers' well-being significantly and are not revealed in unidimensional informality figures.

<p>This is an investigatory work on the Aristotelian foundations of Martha Nussbaum's capabilities approach and the disability issue. After an initial exposition of the capabilities approach and the application of the approach on the disability issue, the author makes a survey of the previous works of Nussbaum on Aristotle. That survey of the works of Nussbaum on Aristotle was utilized to evaluate the Aristotelian foundations of the capabilities approach (which Nussbaum claims is an Aristotelian approach). The conclusion was that Aristotle, as developed by Nussbaum, does not provide a sufficient foundation for the approach nor for the issue on disability.</p>

This is an investigatory work on the Aristotelian foundations of Martha Nussbaum's capabilities approach and the disability issue. After an initial exposition of the capabilities approach and the application of the approach on the disability issue, the author makes a survey of the previous works of Nussbaum on Aristotle. That survey of the works of Nussbaum on Aristotle was utilized to evaluate the Aristotelian foundations of the capabilities approach (which Nussbaum claims is an Aristotelian approach). The conclusion was that Aristotle, as developed by Nussbaum, does not provide a sufficient foundation for the approach nor for the issue on disability.

The global economic crisis that began in 2007 affected the lives of many people in the UK. Most existing research into the effects of ‘the Great Recession’ on well-being takes an economic or subjective approach to assessing the impacts of hard times. This thesis takes an alternative perspective: the Capabilities Approach (CA) is used to assess the effects of economic crisis on people’s freedom to lead flourishing lives. The study develops a theoretical framework that combines the CA with concepts from Philosophy and Social Psychology - the theories of practical reason and personal values. These concepts are then operationalised using data from the European Social Survey and quantitative methods, including latent variable techniques and structural equation models. The study reveals that economic crisis had a two-fold effect on well-being, resulting in (1) reduced opportunities to achieve valuable outcomes and (2) diminished expectations, aspirations and goals. These effects were concentrated among socio-economically vulnerable groups, including those on low incomes and the long-term sick and disabled: the findings show that economic crisis compounded existing socio-economic inequalities. The research makes three main contributions. First, it demonstrates theoretically and empirically that subjective well-being is not a reliable indicator for evaluating the effects of hard times on well-being; nor is it, more generally, a suitable guide for public policy. Second, it demonstrates a new methodological approach to identifying latent ‘value orientations’ within Schwartz’s framework of personal values. Third, in combining the CA with theories of practical reason and personal values, this research offers a new approach to conceptualising and measuring the agency aspect of capability.

This research report builds on the work already completed in the field of women in school leadership. Although a number of studies have examined female principals at work in primary schools in rural areas, there has not been a strong focus on female principals at work in secondary schools, in urban areas. The underrepresentation of women in school leadership is not unique to South Africa. It is a global phenomenon, which can be traced back to the patriarchal values, which exist in most societies. The purpose of my research report is to investigate how the capabilities approach can inform our understanding of women progressing into leadership positions at secondary schools in South Africa. A qualitative method was used based on an interpretivist research paradigm. The research design was a narrative inquiry. A purposive sampling method was used and data was collected by means of semi-structured interviews. The drive and determination to “make a difference” and “be a role model” enabled all five participants to convert their capability set into functionings thus “shattering the glass ceiling”. / Dissertation (MEd)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Education Management and Policy Studies / MEd / Unrestricted