Chapter Twelve

Meaningful Work: A Philosophy of Work and a Politics of Meaningfulness1

Ruth Yeoman

The Problem of Meaninglessness

One consequence of the present economic crisis has been to heighten anxiety that we lack a social bond resilient enough to secure the trust between groups and individuals upon which the long-term stability of our political and economic institutions depends. Yet at the same time as we mourn the weakening of traditional sources of solidarity, such as community, religion and family, we fail to appreciate a fountainhead of everyday interactions involving at least 70 per cent of the population – that of the work we do together to sustain a system of social cooperation. Such neglect is short-sighted because, in work, we are required to relate to one another across lines of difference in order to maintain the social and technical complex upon which we all depend for our survival and flourishing. Through acting together to get the work done we form understandings of self and others, in the process forging social bonds which spill over into other areas of life. In other words, when we work together, we make meanings and create values in order to make sense of the world, and of our place within it. Because cohesive social bonds are created and sustained through collective meaning-making, then how we make meanings, and what we do with them, is not simply of interest because it is a dimension of personal psychological development: it is also, and vitally, of public interest. Positive values in work, such as usefulness, contributing, providing or achieving, are goods we share, because each one of us draws upon them to construct practical identities which give our lives a sense of purpose and meaning.2

Conversely, negative values which foster a sense of meaninglessness generate social ills, such as physical and mental ill-health, increased risk of poverty, stunted life trajectories and social unrest. Because these social ills affect us all, then what happens inside the experience of work is of public concern, transcending neo-liberal claims that all we need to be worried about with respect to a just organisation of work is to guarantee the personal freedom to choose one’s occupation, to create fair competition for the scarce resource of good-quality jobs, or to alleviate unemployment by providing any kind of job, no matter how precarious or exploitative. Instead, proper public concern for how people experience their work will pay attention to the ways in which the content and quality of work enriches or impoverishes the common stock of positive meanings and values, and, specifically, will seek to enable everyone to develop their meaning-making capabilities through meaningful work, organised by a system of workplace democracy. This essay concludes that themes of Blue Labour – community, solidarity and mutual interdependence – provide a particularly productive intellectual space for reflecting upon the character of work, and for generating a distinctive politics of meaningful work through the institution of workplace democracy.

The Meaning Potential of All Work

All work, even the most unpromising, contains positive meanings and values. These meanings, however, are not given automatically: instead, they arise out of interrelations between self, others and the material world.3 As we interact with people and things in order to get the work done, then we find ourselves struggling with resistances and differences – struggles which give rise to new understandings of the work we do, and of the people we do it with and for. For example, a study of hospital cleaners found that, despite the low social valuation of their work, some cleaners sought to positively revalue their work as skilled and worthwhile by actively engaging in tasks which supported patient recovery, including interacting with patients, visitors and nurses.4

But in power-laden hierarchies where the organisation of work is seen as a management prerogative, such differing interpretations of meaning and value often remain as pre-political potentials, unless they are brought into public evaluation through democratic deliberation. When interpretive differences become subject to public evaluation and judgement through a system of workplace democracy in which workers are co-decision-makers, then they have the potential to generate a public resource of positive values, from which we can draw to create meaningful self-identities. Thus, the organisation of work is an important political project because, not only do we make work, but to the extent that we diminish or enhance work as a source of positive values, work makes us, giving narrative shape to our lives by grounding our identities and forming our capabilities.

The creation and promotion of meanings in work, however, is riven by the uses and abuses of power; in other words, work is replete with politics and difficult choices, demanding that we work out what justice demands with respect to what kind of work is made available to whom, how it is to be organised, and how we are to determine what it means to us. Therefore, deliberative engagement with interpretive differences requires a politics of meaningfulness, instituted by a system of workplace democracy, where economic citizenship is rooted not only in paid employment, but in all the work – paid and unpaid – we do together to sustain a complex system of social cooperation.

Political Neglect of the Organisation and Content of Work

Serious political attention to the organisation of work is lacking. One reason for this neglect is the peculiarly ambivalent position which work occupies in advanced post-industrial societies – simultaneously valued for providing the means for self-realisation and disvalued for being burdensome and compulsory. Work is either a source of expressive human action, one of ‘the hopes of civilisation’,5 fulfilled in a correctly ordered society which enables all persons to do decent, humane and dignified work; or it is an experience of oppressive degradation, from which we must escape, since the worker deprived of worthwhile activities ‘generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become’,6 resulting in him or her becoming ‘a crippled monstrosity’.7 Even though our survival, and our capacity to flourish, depends upon our being able to work together, the work itself often fails to meet vital human aspirations for expressive self-determination, non-dominated relations to others and stable identities.

But although changes in the nature and organisation of work appear to have diminished work as a site of worthwhile human action, the meaning of work as compulsion has not entirely crowded out the meaning of work as free, expressive and creative action.8 The ideal of meaningful work, of activity which aims at worthwhile purposes, uses the full range of a person’s distinctive capabilities, and commands our emotional engagement retains a strong hold upon our imagination, motivating us to seek work which adds to the personal meaning of our lives – and even to aspire to a society transformed by each person being able to do work which he or she finds to be worth doing. And no work is so objectively degraded that it cannot be revitalised through forms of democratic participation in meaning-making with others.

Another reason for political neglect is the assumption that work is best organised by management experts, according to technical reasoning which needs no deliberative evaluation. Or, in other words, the political has no place in the economic. But the work we do together is a social institution, which we can arrange either to enable or disable a person’s capabilities for meaning-making; capabilities which we need to create and sustain the stock of positive values from which we forge a sense that our lives have meaning. Kovacs describes work as ‘a basic mode of being in the world’, where ‘to work means to humanise the world and to produce something’.9 In this sense, work is a site of human action which produces values and meanings beyond the realm of its economic productivity. It is a mode of being in the world which exceeds the employment relation to include all the activities which contribute to producing and reproducing a complex system of social cooperation.

But, if work is to humanise the world, it must at the same time humanise the one through whom the work takes place; in Morris’ terms: ‘Nothing should be made by man’s labour which is not worth doing; or which must be made by labour degrading to the makers’.10 Work cannot be meaningful if it requires the enslavement of the worker, the deformation of her human capabilities, or the misrecognition of her vital commitments. This means that some work is morally desirable, and some work is not, requiring that the improvement of individuals and of society depends upon work having a certain interior content, given by the structure of meaningfulness. And we should seek to give to all work the structure for meaningfulness, because being able to experience our lives as meaningful – that is, containing worthwhile purposes and projects which are able to command our emotional attachment – is a fundamental human need which, in contemporary societies, is very difficult to realise if our work lacks the requisite structure.

The Fundamental Human Need for Meaningfulness

Engaging with positive meaning by creating, nurturing and promoting the values embodied in worthy objects such as persons, animals, material things or institutions is something we all do: indeed, we must do, if we are to be human.11 Frankl identified the ‘will to meaning’ to be a fundamental human drive, compelling us to engage in a search for the positive values which give us a sense that our lives are worth living.12 For Holbrook, the harms of a frustrated will to meaning, manifested in dysfunctions such as compulsive consumerism, are of such public concern that he proposes a fundamental question for politics: ‘what opportunities do societies provide for the satisfaction of the human need for meaning, and how should societies be organised in order to provide those opportunities?’13

This question is directly relevant to the sphere of working. When we work, we are not motivated purely by external goods, such as pay or profit – we act also out of a fundamental need for living a worthwhile life. In the absence of a politics of meaningfulness, people will seek some outlet for their frustrated will to meaning; for example, denied the experience of autonomy, workers will invent simulations of self-determination in the form of games, or even make deliberate mistakes, which Burawoy describes as the art of ‘making out’.14 Amongst numerous testimonies to such practices, is that of the worker who said: ‘Yes, I want my signature on ’em too. Sometimes, out of pure meanness, when I make something, I put a little dent in it. I like to do something to make it really unique. Hit it with a hammer. I deliberately […] it up to see if it’ll get by, just so I can say I did it’.15 In a liberal democratic society, the need for expressive self-determination ought to be satisfied in a politics of meaningfulness which seeks to ensure that people are not prevented from experiencing their lives as meaningful because of the work they do. Having an equal share of decision-making power, instituted by a system of workplace democracy, not only supports the emergence of such a politics, but is part of what realises the meaningfulness potential of work.

Whilst it is necessary for us to make a living, it is needful also for us to satisfy our interests in having something worthwhile to do which is constituted by the goods of autonomy, freedom and social recognition. The importance of such goods for shaping a person’s life as a whole makes meaningful work a fundamental human need; that is, a need which is not to be met in any way whatsoever, but in a manner consistent with the kinds of creatures we are – beings who have unavoidable interests in being able to express free, autonomous action in association with others. Providing a person with any kind of work which simply sustains human existence is not sufficient for satisfying the need for meaningful work, since a person who has become inured to non-meaningful work will still have inescapable interests in the goods of autonomy, freedom and social recognition, and therefore possess an unmet need for meaningful work. A study of mid-life Australians suggests, for example, that poor-quality work involving job strain and insecurity may be as bad for health outcomes as unemployment,16 and evidence from the Whitehall Studies links poor health outcomes for civil servants with low control over their work.17

Furthermore, poor-quality, non-meaningful work impacts a person’s sense of self-worth and self-efficacy, damaging their sense that they have a life of their own to live, which is not subject to the arbitrary control of others. Simone Weil in her philosophical reflections upon factory work suggests that some work is subject to such arbitrary relations of power between managers and workers that, in order to protect themself from the harms of domination, the worker will avoid imagining the possibility of personal change and development; their ‘thought draws back from the future’ so that ‘this perpetual recoil upon the present produces a kind of brutish stupor’.18 In such a condition, a person is unable to plan for the future; their capabilities for meaning-making are stunted, therefore radically reducing their chances of being able to find positive values in their work which can form the basis of a stable self-identity.

In no small way the work we do determines ‘the distribution of lives’:19 work provides access to the roles, practices and social institutions of society which allocate resources for the development of the capabilities we require to secure our social position and economic participation over the course of life. Furthermore, such social structures embody the values we can potentially incorporate into our practical identities, grounding the sense that our lives have meaning. This makes being able to experience work with the relevant structure for meaningfulness of such importance that it is a fundamental human need, requiring the organisation of society to eliminate non-meaningful work from the work of social cooperation. Meaningful work has always been available to the few who occupy social roles allowing them to exercise complex capabilities, such as expressive freedom and personal autonomy, through activities which aim at a worthwhile purpose and affective engagement. But a just social order will be concerned to mitigate the harms of an uneven distribution of meaningfulness in work, and will seek to ensure that all work provides for the development and exercise of complex capabilities.20 This does not imply that society must be organised so that each person can access an elite ideal of exceptional meaning, or even that the state should guarantee that all persons actually find their work to be meaningful, but suggests instead the more modest and practical aim that everyday work is structured to ensure that it contains objects which are worth pursuing, and is organised to develop our human capabilities for meaning-making with others by instituting democratic practices in work.

Describing the Value of Meaningfulness

Meaningfulness is not anything we want it to be: not any activity or attachment is meaningful just because it makes us happy, or even if it fulfils a duty. Moral philosopher Susan Wolf specifies a value of meaningfulness distinct from welfare and universal duty, where meaningfulness is ‘a category of value that is not reducible to happiness or morality, and that is realised by loving objects worthy of love and engaging with them in a positive way’.21 For Wolf, the value of meaningfulness is described by bringing together subjectivity and objectivity into a ‘bipartite value’ of meaningfulness in which ‘meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness’.22

Such an experience of meaningfulness is more likely to occur when a person becomes connected to a worthy object – something or someone of value – such that they are actively ‘gripped, excited, involved by it’.23 Thus, meaningfulness consists of uniting objectivity and subjectivity in activities which contain worthy objects we can publicly agree have positive value, and which enable emotional attachments signalling our personal endorsement of their importance in our lives. In this way, the bipartite value of meaningfulness explains the special ties we feel towards our ‘ground projects’24 – projects which help us to answer the question, ‘what reasons do we have for living?’25 And it is this interior structure at which a politics of meaningfulness in work should aim.

For a person to experience the bipartite value of meaningfulness, their work must be structured to enable objectively attractive values to be actively incorporated, via subjective attachment, into their practical identity, or their self-conception of what makes their life worth living. This is a process in which we already participate on a daily basis, since it is in ordinary human living that the need for meaning is satisfied: ‘Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfil the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual’.26 As we grapple with the everyday tasks of living, then, as far as our situation allows, we develop capabilities for meaning-making, and participate with others in creating, promoting and appreciating positive values. These capabilities are more securely developed in contexts of autonomy, freedom and social recognition – and a system of workplace democracy is an especially fruitful context because such a system establishes our equal status as co-authorities in the public creation and maintenance of values.

But being responsive to, and engaging with, the particular value of worthy objects does not mean that we can have any kind of orientation we want towards them, just in case such orientations generate strong affective attachments. What is required also is that our appropriation of worthy objects to the meaning content of our lives gives rise to legitimate involvement, where legitimacy means promoting the good for the worthy objects; in other words, that we have a care for how well they are doing. This suggests that an ethic of care, not technical-economic reasoning, forms the standard against which we judge the good for worthy objects, and therefore the quality of our actions towards those objects.

Experiencing the Value of Meaningfulness and an Ethic of Care

Since meaningfulness is not anything we want it to be, nor is it any kind of action with respect to others which satisfies our preferences or increases our personal utility, then an ethic of care provides a standpoint from which to evaluate our actions towards worthy objects. Fisher and Tronto define taking care as including ‘everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our world, so that we can live in it as well as possible’.27 Caring for something implies taking up responsibilities to secure the good for the object of our caring activities. The numerous social roles which make up the work of social cooperation are a source of active relations to worthy objects which present us with innumerable opportunities to take up responsibilities, and thus to learn to become practitioners of caring. Being able to fulfil our responsibilities is closely tied to our membership of practices and institutions, and the social roles we inhabit. And discharging our responsibilities requires a ‘proneness’, or a readiness to have our actions guided by reasons of love, which ensures that we are ‘acting in a way that positively engages with a worthy object of love [...] even if it does not maximally promote either the agent’s welfare or the good of the world, impartially assessed’.28

Becoming susceptible to reasons of love means putting ourselves into an active relationship with objects of value, where we develop the capabilities for recognising what is of value and for acting appropriately towards worthy objects. Held distinguishes an ethics of care from an ethics of justice in what is morally relevant for ‘attending to and meeting the needs of the particular others for whom we take responsibility’.29 For Held, care is both a value and a practice, where care is a practice because it involves ‘the work of care-giving and the standards by which the practices of care can be evaluated’.30 Held points out that activities can be performed without adhering to the values relevant to the practice: ‘An activity must be purposive to count as work or labor, but it need not incorporate any values, even efficiency, in the doing of it. Chopping at a tree, however clumsily, to fell it, could be work’.31 The implication of Held’s observation is that positive values are realised not in just any kind of work, but in work of specific character: that is, meaningful work in which practising care towards worthy objects enables the practitioner to experience the goods of autonomy, freedom and social recognition.

Thus, being able to ascribe the positive values inherent in social roles, practices and institutions to the meaningfulness of our lives depends upon our accepting the relevant responsibilities, where consenting to take on responsibilities for worthy objects often requires us to expend discretionary, as well as remunerated, time and effort. Each day, people willingly take up responsibilities in the work they do: cleaners, call centre operatives and carers (to name but a few vital occupations) clean, make calls, and care for the sick and elderly – and they do not take up these responsibilities simply because they are paid to do so, but because they want to do good work. Indeed, many seek to extend their roles, excavating positive meanings from their work, meanings which motivate them to expend discretionary effort in order to meet the needs of fellow human beings.

It is, of course, possible for people to train, to take up responsibilities, and to engage in complex, cooperative activities without those activities having the relevant structure for meaningfulness, but this is to instrumentalise people with no regard for their fundamental human need for meaning. One of the injustices of the modern organisation of work is the way in which organisations aim to increase workers’ responsibilities, without a commensurate increase in control over the resources and decision-making necessary to fulfil their responsibilities.32 Frequently, work is organised to extract discretionary effort from workers to the benefit of organisations, and fails to address normative concerns for asymmetrical power relations which exploit effort without instituting voice as co-decision. And whilst the responsibility/control gap does not eliminate all positive meanings from those activities, it does severely inhibit a person’s ability to engage with others in meaning-making, and to find those positive meanings affectively attractive.

Work incorporating positive values of care is meaningful work, and is susceptible to being evaluated against an ethic of care when we ask what constitutes caring in relation to the particular worthy objects at which the actions aim. This is a profoundly political question, because what we mean by good care involves disagreement, deliberation and judgement, demanding an ethico-political understanding of care as the basis for deliberating over the values and standards necessary to the work we do together. Developing such an understanding requires the practice of ‘democratic caring’33 in which all citizens have access to structures of social belonging allowing them to make their contribution to the work of social cooperation, and to participate in the interpretation of values inherent to their work. Tronto, for example, argues that ‘creating caring institutions’ is an unavoidably political process requiring us to evaluate power relations, to ensure that care remains both particular to the worthy objects at which our actions aim and pluralist in the range of caring values, and to ensure ‘care has a clear, legitimate purpose’.34

To enable us to orientate ourselves to the needs of worthy objects, caring institutions must provide public space for needs-interpretation, in which both workers and the cared-for can engage with values, finding them worthy or unworthy, attractive or unattractive, as they seek to satisfy the human need for meaningfulness. This requires democratic deliberation, and in the work of social cooperation, a system of workplace democracy sufficiently extensive to institute a politics of meaningfulness which allows for public evaluation of the values upon which we draw to give our lives purpose and meaning. Furthermore, it implies a public policy suite designed to secure meaningful work for all, including: a good work index; a guarantee of individual capability development through institutional belonging; a framework establishing direct and representative employee voice, which includes the collective voice of union representation; an equal playing field for different organisational forms, such as mutuals, cooperatives and employee-owned enterprises – and a general dismantling of hierarchies or networks which foster the arbitrary use of power through non-democratic authority.

Blue Labour and a New Politics of Meaningfulness

If the Labour movement is about anything, then it is about the lives of ordinary people, their experiences of working and of not working, and of how those experiences shape their practical identities. Specifically, Blue Labour is about designing the political, social and economic institutions which allow for expressive modes of being beyond the commodification of the self, and the expropriation of human capabilities to a rent-seeking financial elite. One route to realising the values of Blue Labour is to revive and enrich the public good of meaningfulness, by enabling everyone to engage in the co-production of our common stock of positive values. The themes of Blue Labour are particularly valuable in this endeavour because, in the political economy of Blue Labour, the individual is not cast out to create meaning alone, but neither is she subsumed into pre-given meanings; instead, the individual, as an equal co-authority, is interrelated to others through the co-creation of positive values.

This requires the establishment of a deliberative society, including widespread workplace democracy, in order to draw people into meaningful encounter across social and economic divisions. Mary Parker Follett characterised the process of group decision-making as ‘the inner workshop of democracy’,35 because it is in the direct experience of deliberating with others that we form the virtues, attitudes and habits of citizenship. Thus, the promise of a Blue Labour political economy is that citizenship becomes grounded in the joining of personal meaning-making to public deliberation, supported by an economic architecture in which structures of ownership and control provide everyone with a share of decision-making power.

In sum, the concept of meaningful work deserves wider intellectual and political attention. Although we are now exhorted to find satisfaction and self-fulfilment in consumption, Morris’ call for dignified and humane labour retains a toehold in our imaginings of what a flourishing human life ought to look like. Indeed, Morris’ comment upon the purchase of goods, ‘Tis the lives of men you buy’,36 indicates how we might link the moral and political dimensions of consumption and production.

This is because if we acquire goods from the oppressions of others then we compromise the possibilities for our own life – if one life can be made vulnerable because of the work he or she does, then so can the life of any man or woman. Consumers can be satisfied even where producers are exploited, alienated or otherwise harmed, but consumers are also producers with interests in not being exploited, alienated, or subjected to undignified work. This provides us with common cause in ensuring that all work is meaningful work, constituted by the goods of autonomy, freedom and social recognition, thereby increasing the likelihood of it being the source of social bonds essential to stitching together the institutional fabric upon which we all depend.

Notes

1. Ruth Yeoman, Meaningful Work and Workplace Democracy: A Philosophy of Work and a Politics of Meaningfulness (New York and Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

2. B. Roessler, ‘Meaningful work: arguments from autonomy’, Journal of Political Philosophy 20 (2012), pp. 71–93. See C. Korsegaard, Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity and Integrity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

3. C. Dejours, ‘Subjectivity, work and action’, Critical Horizons 7 (2006), pp. 45–62.

4. A. Wrzesniewski and J. Dutton, ‘Crafting a job: revisioning employees as active crafters of their work’, Academy of Management Review 26 (2001), pp. 179–201.

5. William Morris, News From Nowhere and Other Writings (London: Penguin Books, 1993).

6. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (London: Penguin Books, 1999 [1776]).

7. K. Marx, ‘Capital, vol. 1: the process of production of capital’, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. R. Tucker (New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978).

8. See D. A. Spencer, ‘The ‘Work as Bad’ Thesis in Economics: Origins, Evolution, and Challenges’, Labor History 50 (2009), pp. 39–57.

9. G. Kovacs, ‘Phenomenology of work and self-transcendence’, The Journal of Value Inquiry 20 (1986), pp. 195–207, quote at p. 198.

10. W. Morris, Art and Socialism (1884).

11. Ruth Yeoman, ‘Conceptualising meaningful work as a fundamental human need’, Journal of Business Ethics 125/2 (2014), pp. 235–51.

12. V. Frankl, The Will to Meaning (New American Library: New York, 1988).

13. D. Holbrook, ‘Politics and the need for meaning’, in R. Fitzgerald (ed.), Human Needs and Politics (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1977).

14. M. Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism (London: University of Chicago Press, 1979).

15. See S. Terkel, Working (Wildwood House: London, 1975), p. 22.

16. D. H. Broom, R. M. D’Souza, L. Strazdius, P. Butterworth, P. Paslow, B. Rodgers, ‘The lesser evil: bad jobs or unemployment? A survey of mid-aged Australians’, Social Sciences & Medicine 63 (2006), pp. 575–86.

17. H. Bosma, M. G. Marmot, H. Hemingway, A. C. Nicholson, E. Brunner, S. Stansfeld, ‘Low Job Control and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease in Whitehall II (Prospective Cohort) Study’, British Medical Journal (1997), p. 314.

18. S. Weil, ‘Factory work’, in G. A. Panichas (ed.), The Simone Weil Reader (New York: David McKay Company, 1997), p. 57.

19. M. Walzer, Thick and Thin (Paris: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994).

20. Cf. P. Gomberg, How to Make Opportunity Equal: Race and Contributive Justice (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007).

21. S. Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 13.

22. Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters, p. 9.

23. Ibid.

24. Bernard Williams, Persons, Character and Morality, in B. Williams (ed.), Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

25. Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters, p. 56.

26. V. E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Washington Square Press, 1984), p. 98.

27. B. Fisher and J. Tronto, ‘Toward a feminist theory of caring’, in E. K. Abel and M. K. Nelson (eds), Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Lives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), p. 40.

28. Fisher and Tronto, ‘Toward a feminist theory of caring’, p. 33.

29. V. Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political and Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 10.

30. Ibid., p. 36.

31. Ibid., p. 37.

32. F. D. Pot and E. Koningsveld, ‘Quality of Working Life and Organizational Performance – Two Sides of the Same Coin?’, Scandinavian Journal of Work and Environmental Health (2009). Available at http://www.rower-eu.eu:8080/rower/conferences/1stWorkshop/pot.pdf (accessed on 25 August 2014).

33. S. Sevenhuijsen, ‘Caring in the Third Way: the relation between obligation, responsibility and care in Third Way discourse’, Critical Social Policy 20 (2000), pp. 5–37, at p. 22.

34. J. Tronto, ‘Creating caring institutions: politics, plurality, and purpose’, Ethics and Social Welfare 4 (2010), pp. 158–71, at p. 162.

35. M. P. Follett, The New State: Group Organization the Solution of Popular Government (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998).

36. W. Morris, Art and Socialism (1884).