Compatibility is not a contribution: a response to Leesa Wheelahan

This short response continues a debate with Leesa Wheelahan on the capabilities approach in vocational education and training (VET) research, held to celebrate the 250th issue of the Journal of Vocational Education and Training. It builds on my earlier paper and responds to Wheelahan’s paper in the debate. Wheelahan narrows the disagreement considerably. She accepts that the approach cannot tell us what a curriculum should contain or diagnose problems in labour markets, and that substantive theorising must come from elsewhere. She also distinguishes the approach’s ethical individualism from methodological individualism. I accept this distinction and agree that aspiration and voice name real issues in our field. But compatibility with a relational account of the social is not a contribution to it. I argue that on Wheelahan’s own account, the approach supplies questions, while the answers come from critical realism, Bernstein, and Marx. The disagreement is therefore about whether tying these questions to the capabilities vocabulary helps answer them or diverts us from more specific theories of knowledge, occupations, and the institutional conditions of good work.