Where We Are on the Journey: Human Potential, Capabilities, and a New Book from Optentia
A journey that began in 2010
When Optentia was formed in 2010, we set out to understand something deceptively simple: what truly allows human potential to flourish? In our earliest years, we pursued that question largely from within single disciplines, each offering its own partial view. Over the years since, our research has undergone a decisive evolution — moving from single-disciplinary enquiry toward the interdisciplinary approaches that now define our work.
A new book, Capabilities at Work: The Added Value of the Capability Model for Well-Being and Work — edited by Jac van der Klink and Sebastiaan (Ian) Rothmann and published by Cambridge University Press — is a direct expression of that shift. It is not simply another publication. It is the culmination of years of thinking and research about human potential, and it illustrates a genuinely different way of thinking about that potential. More than anything, it is a moment in time: a chance to pause, to share, and to celebrate where we are on a research journey that is interdisciplinary and grounded in social justice.
The problem beneath the problems
Human development is stalling. The world faces wicked problems — tangled, systemic, and resistant to the single-discipline solutions we keep reaching for. Poverty, inequality, unemployment, the widening AI divide, and poor health and well-being all shape whose potential is realised and whose is quietly lost. Here in South Africa, unemployment among youth aged 15–24 reached 60,9% in early 2026 (Stats SA, Q1 2026), amid deep inequality.
Beneath all of it sits the same overlooked pattern — one that most work research misses: the resources and rights exist, but the conditions to turn them into real, sustainable employability keep failing. Capabilities at Work confronts that failure head-on, and it does so by crossing disciplines rather than working within one.
A new lens: the Capability Approach
The paradigm at the heart of the book is the Capability Approach (CA). The idea traces back decades to Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, but what is new is its application to flourishing in work and organisational contexts, following Van der Klink et al. (2016) and Gloss et al. (2017).
That shift reframes the question. Not simply what predicts performance — but what people are genuinely free to be and do, so that they can work, stay healthy, and flourish. It looks past individual personality and motivation to the systems and structures that both constrain and open up what people can realistically achieve. It is a question of justice as much as science: who is truly free to pursue decent work, and a life, they have reason to value?
It is also the sharpest lens we have on the AI divide. That divide begins with access — who can afford the technology and reach the networks it runs on — but it does not end there: it reaches all the way to who is genuinely free to convert that access into a life they have reason to value. And the same systems and structures tend to withhold both.
Complementing, not discarding
Dominant frameworks such as the job demands–resources model, self-determination theory, and the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) model have shaped decades of research and practice. The book does not discard them — it complements and extends them. Where these existing models largely explain how resources and demands affect outcomes, the CA asks a further, more normative question: what should people be free to achieve through their work, and what must organisations and societies do to make that freedom real?
This is a genuinely new lens for our field, and relatively few academics, HR practitioners, or policymakers have yet been exposed to it.
Colleagues who became a community
No paradigm shift is the work of one person, or one discipline. This book is the product of experts who, over years of shared enquiry, became colleagues and collaborators in the study of human potential — an interdisciplinary network spanning health, psychology, philosophy, and human development. Twelve of the book's authors are affiliated with North-West University, and together they reflect diversity in race, age and gender — a community that mirrors the very questions of justice and freedom the book explores.
That community will gather for the launch. Attending in person are leading international and national experts from our interdisciplinary research network, among them Prof. Jac van der Klink, Prof. Roland Blonk, Prof. Margot Joosen and Prof. Evelien Brouwers (Tilburg University); Prof. Wilmar Schaufeli (KU Leuven); Prof. Jasper van Assche (Vrije Universiteit Brussel); Prof. Sebastiaan Rothmann, Prof. Blessed Ngwenya and colleagues from North-West University; and Mr Letshego Mokeki (Director: Career Development, DHET, South Africa). Prof. Sridhar Venkatapuram (King's College London) will join online.
Why the launch belongs beyond the university
Because the book speaks across communities — academic, organisational, and policy — its launch belongs beyond the university. Hosting it at Momentum in Pretoria, in Gauteng, South Africa's economic heartland, places this new paradigm where academics, practitioners, and decision-makers converge, and where awareness of the Capability Approach can begin to take root among the very people equipped to act on it. A launch of this calibre, in a setting of this reach, is our chance to make that happen.
Join us
We would be delighted to have you with us as we mark this moment on the journey.
• Date: Wednesday, 23 September 2026, 10:00–13:30
• Venue: Momentum, Pretoria — a premier venue accommodating up to 100 guests in person
• Format: Hybrid — live in Pretoria (100 participants), with a simultaneous YouTube broadcast
• Register: https://bit.ly/CapabilitiesAtWork
