This week I received my copy of “The Capability Approach“:http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521862875, a fat book that contains a large number of essays on… yes, good guess. It’s primarily written by social scientists or interdisciplinary oriented scholars — hence not so much the more philosophical side of that literature. Sometimes I feel very happy and satisfied, perhaps even a little proud, when I see a book to which I’ve contributed a chapter. For instance, that was the case last September when Jude Browne’s splendidly edited “The Future of Gender“:http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521697255 came out. That volume contains many excellent essays on issues of gender and sexual difference by interesting thinkers, and I felt my own chapter was decent enough. Sadly, I do not have such feelings about my chapter in The Capability Approach. The simple reason is that that chapter was written in 2001, and analyses certain limitations of the capability approach for the analysis of gender issues. Yet in the 6 years and 8 months between sending that chapter to the editors and its ultimate publication, I think very little of what I wrote in that article is still original or not by now broadly appreciated. The literature on the capability approach has developed at an incredibly fast pace, and the arguments in that chapter are… well, a little old. Academic publishing is a slow business – often too slow. Anybody a worse experience than those 6 years and 8 months?