From Knowledge to Informational Basis: Capability, Capacity to Aspire and Research

Abstract

This article explores the way the process of transformation of knowledge into an ‘informational basis’ (of policies and of public choice) represents a good terrain for building an effective exchange and collaboration between the capability approach and other efforts, in the social sciences, to emphasize the crucial role of agency, actors’ critical capacities and voice. Beyond the rhetorical image of our self-claimed ‘knowledge societies’, the analysis of the contemporary characteristics of the relationship between knowledge and an informational basis leads us to reconceive research in terms of a human right to actively participate in the knowledge-making process, enabling citizens’ capacity for voice to intervene in the construction of the informational bases of the collective decision. Starting from focusing on these transformations through research cases about the informational basis framing the relationship between safety and work, the article shows how, beyond labour issues, at stake is the relationship between knowledge and democracy, as the core moment of the latter, before the political choice is the cognitive one. An effective interaction between the capability approach and other social science perspectives of research centred on agency and capacity offers very helpful analytical tools for a critical appraisal and inquiry into these transformations.