Construct · 4 fields · 8 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one word, four constructs Nearest construct by meaningcapabilitycompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to capability is capability.
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In quality engineering, a process capability measures how well the natural spread of a manufacturing process fits within its specification limits, so a capable process keeps its output inside tolerance. The idea grows out of the statistical control of manufacturing and was set out as process capability analysis in Juran's 1951 Quality Control Handbook; Kane's 1986 Process Capability Indices gave the standard ratios Cp and Cpk that scale the specification width against the process spread. Here the referent is a property of a machine or production line, a number comparing variation to a tolerance, and it has nothing to do with a firm's know-how, a person's real freedoms, or an access right held by a program.[1][2]
In computer systems, a capability is an unforgeable reference that both names a protected object and carries the exact access rights its holder may exercise on it, so holding the capability is what grants the access. Dennis and Van Horn's 1966 Programming semantics for multiprogrammed computations introduced the term for these access-carrying tokens, and it became the basis of capability-based security and later object-capability systems. Here the referent is a token inside a machine, a ticket that couples an object to permitted operations, and it is unrelated to a production line's tolerance, a company's competitive know-how, or a person's freedom to live as they choose.[3]
In welfare economics and political philosophy, a capability is a person's real freedom to achieve valuable ways of being and doing, the set of functionings actually open to them given their resources and circumstances. Amartya Sen introduced this meaning in his 1979 lecture Equality of What? (published 1980) and developed it in his 1985 Commodities and Capabilities, and Nussbaum's 2000 Women and Human Development extended it into a list of central human capabilities. Here the referent is an attribute of a human life, the opportunity to do or be things a person has reason to value, and it has no connection to a process tolerance, a firm's routines, or an access right coded into a program.[4][5][6]
In strategic management, an organizational capability is a firm's capacity to perform a coordinated set of tasks reliably by drawing on its resources and routines, and the related dynamic capabilities are its capacity to build, integrate, and reconfigure those routines as conditions change. Nelson and Winter's 1982 An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change grounded firm capabilities in organizational routines, and Teece, Pisano, and Shuen's 1997 Dynamic capabilities and strategic management made dynamic capabilities a central construct for explaining competitive advantage. Here the referent is a collective property of a company, inferred from what the organization can repeatedly do, and it is not a machine tolerance, an access token, or an individual person's set of real freedoms.[7][8]
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