This essay points to an institutional account of our existential interest in work as a missing piece in welfare analysis. In contrast with social liberals in the post-war era, both liberal economic and egalitarian discourses today espouse a narrowly atomistic account of human nature and the...

Summary This article revisits the relation between economic institutions and motives to work. It proposes moving away from a dominant polemical focus on the impact of a single source of security (income support), towards a multi-factorial analysis based on control over working life as a source...