Reading Amartya Sen’s work offers a fruitful avenue for reconsidering organizational viability from a perspective that transcends profit maximization and the mere availability of resources. Within the capability approach, development is not assessed exclusively by what people possess, consume, or report preferring, but by the real freedoms they have to be and do what they have reason to value. When rigorously applied to the organizational field, this premise reframes the managerial question: it is no longer sufficient to determine how much an organization produces or how many resources it allocates; it is also necessary to examine the effective opportunities it creates for its members to learn, decide, participate, and act meaningfully.
In the context of doctoral research focused on organizational viability, this perspective is relevant because it allows a distinction between survival and viability. An organization may continue operating for a period through control, dependence on key individuals, or cost reduction, while simultaneously weakening the conditions that sustain its continuity. Viability entails preserving identity and cohesion, responding to environmental variation, reproducing critical knowledge, and renewing the capabilities required to address future scenarios. From Sen’s perspective, these functions cannot be separated from the real opportunities the organization offers its members.
The core of the capability approach lies in differentiating among resources, capabilities, and functionings. Resources are available means: income, technology, information, infrastructure, formal authority, or access to training. Functionings are concrete achievements; that is, states and activities a person actually attains, such as learning a skill, participating in a decision, performing a role autonomously, or contributing to the resolution of a problem. Capabilities represent the set of combinations of functionings from which a person can genuinely, rather than merely nominally, choose (Sen, 1985, 1992).
This distinction has direct implications for organizational analysis. Providing a technology platform does not ensure that people can use it competently; offering training does not produce learning when there is no time to practise; publishing a promotion pathway does not create mobility if decisions remain closed; and formally delegating responsibility does not generate autonomy when every action requires higher-level authorization. In each case, a resource exists, but its conversion into a capability depends on personal, relational, cultural, and structural conditions. Accordingly, organizational assessment should not stop at the inputs an organization claims to provide, but should investigate the opportunities that are actually available.
Sen’s housing metaphor helps illustrate the argument. The organizational value of a house does not reside solely in its existence as an asset, but in what it enables people to do: live safely, build relationships, rest, and pursue projects. By analogy, a policy, tool, or structure should not be assessed only for what it is, but for the functionings it makes possible. The relevant question is not whether the organization has development, succession, or support mechanisms, but whether those mechanisms verifiably expand the alternatives for action available to individuals and to the system as a whole.
Sen also warns that preferences may adapt to conditions of deprivation. A person long subjected to restrictions may lower their aspirations and report satisfaction with very limited options, not because those conditions are desirable, but because they have learned not to expect alternatives (Sen, 1999). In organizational settings, this observation requires cautious interpretation of climate surveys, expressions of satisfaction, or the absence of conflict. Silence may reflect commitment, but it may also indicate resignation, fear, lack of information, or a history of decisions in which voicing disagreement had no effect.
The notion of adaptive preferences therefore challenges a common practice: assuming that acceptance of existing conditions demonstrates their legitimacy. An organization may normalize overload, the concentration of knowledge, the exclusion of certain employees, or the absence of growth opportunities. Over time, people adjust their expectations and stop requesting what they regard as inaccessible. From the capability perspective, diagnosis should explore not only observed choices, but also the set of plausible options, the information available for recognizing them, and the constraints that prevent an aspiration from becoming a real possibility.
Agency is another central concept. Sen understands it as a person’s ability to act and pursue goals they consider valuable, even when those goals are not reducible to individual well-being (Sen, 1999). In an organization, agency is evident when people can exercise judgment, initiate action, assume responsibility, challenge assumptions, and contribute to shared purposes. It is not equivalent merely to complying efficiently or being assigned more tasks. Responsibility without authority, information, or room for decision-making may increase the burden without necessarily expanding agency.
This distinction makes it possible to connect responsibility with the ability to respond. Organizational responsiveness requires people to possess knowledge, discretion, access to relevant interlocutors, and legitimacy to intervene. When a company demands results without providing the necessary conditions, it turns responsibility into a unilateral attribution of blame. By contrast, when it develops capabilities and distributes authority coherently, responsibility becomes an effective capacity to respond. Individual and collective agency thus ceases to be an abstract attribute and becomes part of the infrastructure for organizational adaptation.
Empowerment may be understood as expanding real power to achieve valued outcomes. Its managerial use, however, must avoid becoming merely rhetorical. Declaring that a team is empowered does not, by itself, alter decision rules, incentives, access to information, or hierarchical relationships. Expanding agency requires transforming the conditions that regulate who may decide, on what matters, with which resources, and through what accountability mechanisms. Without this structural dimension, empowerment becomes a discourse that transfers risk to individuals without transferring power.
From the perspective of organizational viability, agency performs a fundamental adaptive function. No managerial level can anticipate every disturbance or process the full variety of the environment on its own. The organization needs people close to customers, processes, and technologies to detect changes, interpret signals, and act according to shared criteria. A structure that centralizes every decision may produce temporary uniformity, but it reduces response speed and creates dependence. Developing distributed agency broadens the repertoire of available responses and, consequently, the system’s capacity to preserve its purpose under changing conditions.
This connection does not imply that human capabilities and organizational capabilities are equivalent concepts. In Sen’s work, capability refers primarily to people’s substantive freedom; in organization theory, a capability usually describes a collective ability to perform, learn, or adapt. Confusing these levels could instrumentalize human freedom and value it solely for its economic usefulness. The more defensible relationship is one of interdependence: the organization requires collective capabilities in order to remain viable, but those capabilities are constructed through arrangements that either expand or restrict people’s opportunities.
From this synthesis, a viable organization does not treat its members merely as carriers of competencies. It recognizes them as agents capable of valuing, deliberating, and contributing to defining ends. This requires considering not only the efficiency of outcomes, but also the quality of the processes through which they are achieved. Sen emphasizes that justice involves achievements, principles, and procedures (Sen, 2009). Consequently, two organizations may produce similar results while differing profoundly in their ethical and social viability: one does so through participation and development, while the other depends on coercion, exclusion, or exhaustion.
Distribution is likewise a decisive component. Sen’s analysis of famines showed that aggregate food availability does not guarantee people can access it; deprivation may arise from failures in entitlements and access mechanisms. At the organizational level, the overall availability of knowledge, budget, or technology likewise does not ensure effective access. A company may possess abundant information and remain vulnerable if it is concentrated in a few people, if teams do not know the criteria governing decisions, or if the culture penalizes the questions needed to understand them.
Viability therefore depends on the functional distribution of capabilities. The objective is not to make roles or responsibilities mechanically identical, but to ensure that each function has sufficient opportunities, information, and authority to perform within the system. This distribution should include selective redundancy, knowledge transfer, and preparing substitutes. When a critical competence resides exclusively in the founder, an executive, or a specialist, the organization may be efficient in the present while remaining structurally fragile in the face of absence, turnover, or succession.
The capability approach thus offers an especially useful perspective on strategic succession. Designating someone as a successor does not mean that they possess the real capability to perform the role. Gradual access to decisions, legitimacy among relevant stakeholders, understanding of the system, opportunities to make mistakes, and support in developing judgment are all required. Succession becomes viable when it transforms a formal possibility into a set of attainable functionings. Otherwise, the appointment may appear on the organizational chart without any effective freedom to lead the organization.
Organizational development may also be reinterpreted as the deliberate expansion of capabilities. This formulation goes beyond a view focused exclusively on interventions, workshops, or structural changes. An intervention produces development when it changes the conditions that enable individuals and teams to understand their context, coordinate, learn, and choose among alternatives for action. The principal indicator is not the number of activities carried out, but the sustainable expansion of the system’s repertoire of responses. From this perspective, learning means expanding possibilities, not merely accumulating information.
Executive coaching can contribute to this expansion by strengthening reflection, judgment, and agency rather than generating dependence on the consultant or coach. Its value lies in helping the agent recognize options, examine assumptions, anticipate consequences, and make decisions consistent with what they consider valuable. Coaching, however, does not replace structural opportunities. A person may develop clarity and competence and still remain constrained by governance that does not grant authority or by a culture that penalizes initiative.
This consideration demonstrates the importance of integrating choice, talent, and opportunity. Talent without opportunity remains underused; opportunity without preparation may lead to exposure and failure; and choice without real alternatives becomes a formality. To develop relevant organizational capabilities, the three dimensions must be articulated with one another. The organization needs to prepare people, make possible pathways visible, and create conditions in which decisions have real consequences. Viability emerges when this articulation is reproduced across different levels and does not depend on exceptions granted informally.
Methodologically, Sen’s approach suggests broadening the indicators used to evaluate an organization. Financial results remain necessary, but they are not sufficient. It is useful to examine the diversity of alternatives available for responding to problems, access to critical knowledge, the ability to assume new roles, participation in decision-making, the possibility of voicing disagreement, mobility across functions, and the existence of genuine learning opportunities. These indicators do not replace economic performance; they help identify the human and systemic conditions that make such performance sustainable.
It is also necessary to avoid a universal and rigid list of organizational capabilities. One strength of Sen’s approach is that it keeps deliberation open about what should be valued, while recognizing the plurality of contexts and ends. In a technology SME, for example, the updating of knowledge, technical autonomy, customer relationships, and leadership continuity may be crucial. In another organization, safety, interprofessional coordination, or community legitimacy may carry greater weight. Diagnosis should be situated, participatory, and sensitive to the system’s specific constraints.
This openness does not remove normative responsibility. Neither every expressed preference nor every cultural practice should be accepted without examination. The organization must deliberate about which functionings are valuable, which freedoms should not be sacrificed, and how to resolve tensions among individual autonomy, collective coordination, and economic sustainability. The capability approach does not offer an automatic formula, but it does provide a criterion: assess whether arrangements expand substantive freedoms and whether people can reasonably participate in constructing the ends that guide their work.
A critical reading must also acknowledge the limitations of applying Sen directly to business analysis. He developed his approach to examine well-being, development, poverty, and justice, not as a specific theory of organizational design. The application proposed here is therefore an analytical elaboration rather than an equivalence the author establishes. Its usefulness lies in providing an evaluative lens through which to ask what real opportunities organizational structures generate and how the capacity to act is distributed. Operationalization requires complementing it with theories of systems, learning, governance, and change.
Even with this caveat, Sen’s thought transforms our understanding of organizational viability. An organization is not viable solely because it retains revenue, customers, or processes; it must also preserve the capacity to generate new responses without destroying the human conditions that make adaptation possible. When it narrows alternatives, concentrates agency, and turns learning into a privilege of the few, it may sustain temporary results while undermining its future. When it expands capabilities, distributes knowledge, and creates opportunities to act responsibly, it strengthens human dignity and the system’s resilience.
In conclusion, Amartya Sen’s contribution makes it possible to understand organizational viability as an economic, systemic, and human construction. Resources matter, but their value depends on whether they can be converted into functionings; competencies matter, but they require real opportunities to be exercised; and continuity matters, but it loses legitimacy when achieved by suppressing the agency of those who sustain it. A truly viable organization does more than survive change: it preserves and renews its collective capacity to choose, learn, and act, while expanding the substantive freedoms of the people whose work makes its existence possible.
References
Beer, S. (1985). Diagnosing the system for organizations. Wiley.
Robeyns, I. (2017). Wellbeing, freedom and social justice: The capability approach re-examined. Open Book Publishers.
Sen, A. (1985). Commodities and capabilities. North-Holland.
Sen, A. (1992). Inequality reexamined. Harvard University Press.
Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom. Alfred A. Knopf.
Sen, A. (2009). The idea of justice. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.