The Capability Prism: How Organizations Refract Shared Demands into Unequal Capabilities

Scientific article - working version (2026.09.22). 

Abstract: Where do social inequalities come from? Leading organizational accounts typically trace inequality to conflict, dominance, and categorical closure. Drawing on the capability approach, this article theorizes a separate, quieter pathway. Organizations act as capability prisms: they refract shared societal demands, such as working longer, retraining, or combining career with care, into unequal capabilities. The differentiation runs through three orders: the designed order of formal policies, the implemented order of managerial discretion, and the emergent order of culture, climate, and norms. Extending Coleman's micro-to-macro model into a double-deck boat, the theory inserts the organization as a meso-level at which individual outcomes aggregate into organizational differentiation and then into societal stratification. These patterns further feed back on the orders that produced them. The resulting inequality is emergent, arises without any group drawing a boundary or benefiting from it, and divides workers within social categories as much as between them.