The strange non-retreat of the state: implications for the sociology of work

Introduction

In a recent retrospective appraisal of labour process theory, Smith (2015) notes that the state is the one aspect of that theory that has been most neglected by later elaborations. The relationship of work with the state and with macro structures was an important aspect in Braverman’s (1974) elaboration as well as subsequently by Burawoy (1979, 1985), but it did not occur in an intellectual void. That was a period when social science had just been marked by lively theoretical debates on the state, as demonstrated by those between Laclau (1975), Miliband (1970) and Poulantzas (1976), and when conceptualization and empirical research were being launched on the welfare state (Korpi, 1978) and on corporatism (Schmitter, 1974). Yet, the preoccupation with the state and with work organization soon diverged. In a period of expansion in academia and the social sciences, interest politics, industrial relations, work organization and the welfare state could be considered as distinct and essentially self-contained areas.

By the time Work, employment and society was launched in 1987, a time when the restructuring of the post-war state and its relationship to civil society was well under way, the state had become very much a background issue for the sociology of work. This has continued throughout much of the life of the journal. In the period up to 2010, only 14 articles mentioned the state in the title, while 23 mentioned it in the abstract in a substantive sense. It was after the western financial crisis that the role of the state made a major comeback. In the period between 2011 and 2015 the frequency and prominence of the state increased significantly, with the word featuring seven times in the title and 14 in the abstract over just five years. Among the emerging issues in this latest period were state capitalism in China (Peng, 2011; Swider, 2015), the role of the state in financial capitalism (Daguerre, 2014; Walby, 2013) and the implications of ‘austerity’ (Conley, 2012; Rubery and Rafferty, 2013). An increasing share of workplace and industrial relations research now focuses on public sector employment or issues in which the state is an important player, such as globalization, labour market reforms, work–life balance, the family. Yet, curiously, while much attention is placed on the changing nature of the work relationship, little has been said of the changing nature of the state itself. By involving first an unprecedented state intervention in the economy through stimulus packages and bank rescues, and subsequently radical reform plans for the public sector, the crisis of 2008 has seen the welfare state and employment relations raising new, urgent research priorities. The state itself has also influenced the shift in focus as a regulator and sponsor of research. The inclusion of ‘impact’ as a criterion for funding in evaluation processes such as the British Research Excellence Framework was pushing researchers towards more directly policy-relevant – and, therefore, state-relevant – topics.

It is in this context of revived interest that the Work, employment and society conference of 2013 (from which most of the articles in this special section originate) chose the state as its central theme under the title of ‘States of Work’. The emerging empirical issues also required a reflection on conceptualizations of the state. The rising model of ‘state capitalism’ of the Chinese kind, the talk of ‘competitive’ and ‘developmental’ states, and fast-growing comparative research on national institutions such as in the ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ debates were all relevant for the sociology of work, but could not simply be adopted as ad hoc concepts. Rather, their place in the study of work has had to be adequately theorized.

This article introduces a journal special section on the state by reviewing debates in the sociology of work, in political sociology, and in the sociology of the welfare state and gender. It points towards new directions of research that, by bringing together these three areas and by deepening theoretical conceptualizations, can revitalize, and politicize, the sociological study of work, employment and society.

Sociology of work and state

Sociologically, from Weber, the modern state has been conceptualized as a political apparatus ruling over a given territory, whose authority is backed by a legal system, by the capacity to use force and the monopoly over it (Weber, 1968[1922]). The stress and distinctive element from other organizations is on the ‘political’. Therefore, including the state in the analysis of work automatically ‘politicizes’ the subject.

Two aspects of this can be emphasized. One is relational, and based on power. In Poggi’s synthesis, the state is ‘social power in its political form’ (Poggi, 1990: 3). This aspect has been central in debates on the functions of the state (i.e. for what the state uses power). The state could be seen as an instrument (a sort of armed hand supporting the ‘invisible’ one), either directly for the domination of one class, as conceived by a line of Marxist thinkers including Miliband (1970), or, in more nuanced ways for the defence of existing social order, compensating and controlling internal tensions, as in Poulantzas’ (1976) structural functionalism, or in the elaborations of Altvater (1973). Or it could be seen as autonomous: as a contested field, as in Esping-Andersen’s (1985) interpretation of social democratic experiences, or, in a more Weberian way, as a distinctive form of domination, as enunciated by Offe (1984). This latter sense focuses on the second sociologically crucial aspect of the state (i.e. its structure). In Weber’s work, this was in relation to bureaucracy and legal rationality, aspects that have an immense influence on the understanding of labour processes, but for Offe it was more politically related to protection of rules and structure, legitimation and pacification. The Frankfurt school elaborated most on state structure by eclectically integrating Weber and Marx. The modern state was seen as combining bureaucratic repression and bourgeois individualism, and resulting in the colonization of life-world and the incorporation of the working class, but also into a new legitimation crisis due to an inevitable gap between raised expectations and results (Habermas, 1976).

A problem of these debates on state power and structure was that its generally high level of abstraction went at the cost of historical precision and empirical operationalization. The ‘new class struggle’ approach (Clarke, 1991) tried to compensate by placing class and state at different levels of abstraction, as respectively general and historical forms of domination, while holding that social democracy and the welfare state were means to fragment and demobilize class struggle. Jessop (2002), in particular, stressed how the Keynesian welfare state secured Fordism as a system of production and organization, through reliance on vertical integration, centralization and standardization. Burawoy (1985) grounded the state even further, highlighting the potential of comparative research for the understanding of both state and work, as well as, crucially, their variation over time and space, through the ‘extended case method’ linking micro and macro levels. In his earlier work, he had also drawn another link between workplace and state as structure through the concept of the ‘internal state’ (Burawoy, 1979). The internal state, later defined as ‘the political and ideological apparatus of production’ or ‘the regime of production’ (Burawoy, 1985) was the set of formal workplace rules that, by imitating a democratic legal system, hid exploitation and facilitated workers’ consent, or, in Gramscian terms, built hegemony at work. The isomorphic relation between state structures and work organization that was identified by Weber a century ago remains, however, understudied, despite some remarkable efforts, especially on the public sector (e.g. Harney, 2002) and on state policies on work (e.g. Kalev et al., 2008).

The articles in this special section show how these sociological insights can be applied to the contemporary study of work, and, at the same time, how the sociology of work can contribute to the understanding of the state. Cunningham (2016) addresses the link between state and work organization in a context that appears so different from that of Weberian bureaucracies and of Keynesian welfare states: the personalization and outsourcing of social services by the Scottish Government under conditions of austerity. His study shows how fecund the theoretical exchange between state theory and sociology of work can be. On one side, Cunningham employs Jessop’s ‘hollowing out’ and ‘destatization’ concepts to make sense of Scottish policies but, also, uses Korczynski’s work-sociology concept of ‘customer-oriented bureaucracy’ (Korczynski et al., 2000) to explain why, as his findings indicate, work restructuring towards customer orientation raises unavoidable contradictions.

Howell’s (2016) article sheds new light on the previously mentioned classic debates on the relationship between state and capitalism. Drawing on Polanyi, the Regulation School and Jessop, he argues that the state’s role in France and Sweden has been that of facilitating neo-liberal change in countries previously characterized by social democratic compromises. Here, the contribution is from an employment relations perspective that looks not just at institutions, but at how those institutions are utilized by the actors. Through this approach, the author identifies, under the semblance of institutional continuity, a major process of liberalization in the sense of an increase of managerial discretionary power. The possibility of apparently progressive state institutions actually promoting marketization (Greer, 2015) is an emerging issue that will deserve more research across countries.

Barron et al. (2016) discuss another function of the state: that of defining a legal status for citizens that precedes the status of employees by determining individuals’ availability for employment. This function had been long taken for granted but has recently acquired new prominence. Research on migrant workers has already identified how different migration statuses result in different functions for employers (MacKenzie and Forde, 2009), and research in China has highlighted the relevance of internal migrants’ status (Peng, 2011). Barron and colleagues look in more detail at the status of undocumented migrants, a state-created category of growing policy importance. The case of the strikes by the ‘sans-papiers’ in France in 2008–10 is looked at through the theoretical lens of categories as developed by Bourdieu and Boltanski. The analysis shows how, at the same time as the state tried to define worker statuses, social processes in the workplace can contest state categories – as in the case of union-issued ‘strike cards’ accepted by the police as grounds for migrant regularization. At the same time, the article suggests, despite the decline of trade union power identified in Howell’s piece, the relationship between states and unions remain very important. As Touraine argued in the 1980s, the decline of the labour movement as a class actor actually increases the policy involvement of trade unions (Touraine et al., 1987[1984]); in the case studies by Barron and colleagues, this involvement can also lead to unexpected successes.

Inputs from political sociology

Kalleberg noted, in his authoritative assessment of the issue of precarious work: ‘in recent years, sociologists have tended to take the employment relationship for granted and instead focused on topics related to specific work structures […] [and] have thus failed to consider the bigger picture’ (Kalleberg, 2009: 11). The fragmentation of the study of precariousness into the narrow analysis of minority situations is in fact a telling example of how sociology can fail itself by losing sight of the micro–macro link. In the same place, Kalleberg advocates in particular the integration of political sociology, alongside other approaches, into the framing of the precariousness issue.

Political sociology and political science had offered important application of state theory to the problem of work. A clear case was that of corporatist theory, which filled the space open between the polar ends of pluralism and Marxism by problematizing the relationship between associations, individual interests and the state (Crouch, 1977; Schmitter, 1974; Streeck and Schmitter, 1985). Accordingly, the state has the autonomy to establish class compromises. The regulation of work in European economies has generally been viewed as a tripartite model with the state granting special public status to the representatives of producer goods within the economy. This was most evident in the corporatism practised throughout much of democratic Europe. Corporatist debates in the 1970s and early 1980s allowed the creation of distinctions on the basis of the nature of the state, such as between the non-democratic experiences of the inter-war period (Italy, Portugal, Romania) and the more numerous ones of northern and western Europe in the 1970s (Schmitter, 1974). The equilibrium between state and civil society, and the delegation and assumption of state roles by producer groups became relevant objects of analysis that explained, for instance, the otherwise counterintuitive behaviours of large, ‘encompassing’ trade unions such as in Austria (Olson, 1965).

Yet, similar to the sociology of work approach, following much debate in the 1970s and early 1980s, in recent years many of the developments in political economy literature have been remarkably quiet on the role of the state. The Varieties of Capitalism approach, as developed by Hall and Soskice (2001), is an instructive case of the withering attention to the role of the state as an actor but where clearly defined territorial entities are examined as being a key analytical variable. It was explicitly framed as firm-centric, in contrast to the traditional union and/or state-led approaches, in explaining differences among capitalist economies. In fact, some of the most trenchant criticisms of the original formulation of the approach were for its lack of analysis of the state (Schmidt, 2009).

Theoretical neglect notwithstanding, the roles of the state in the regulation of work have been expanding and developing. Three overlapping but often contradictory roles of the state are central to the employment relationship as labelled by Traxler (1999): the state as employer; the substantive role; and the procedural role. The state plays a key role in employment relations as an employer. At one end, this involves stimulating aggregate demand through its employment function under Keynesianism. However, in many ways, under neo-liberalism there has been a shift in the thinking about the substance of the role of the state as employer. Beaumont and Leopold (1985) argued that the state acted as ‘model’ employer due to the high levels of job security, collective bargaining, an equality approach and trade union recognition. As the ‘model’, it set the highest example for other employers in the economy to emulate. Yet, as Farnham and Horton (1992) highlighted during the 1980s, this was reversed to the extent that the public sector was expected to reduce costs through the importation of market-based private sector methods in the form of ‘New Public Management’. In the substantive role, the focus is on how the state acts in terms of shaping areas of government policy, such as the definition of health and safety regulations and of working time, which was historically the first area of legal regulation of work after the industrial revolution. A procedural role involves the definition of the ‘rules of the game’ and of the legal status of employment contracts and collective agreements, as well as mediation roles. Over the past 25 years, an example of this function that has attracted extensive research is the role that states played in formulating social pacts in the run up to Economic and Monetary Union in the European Union (EU). Researchers have disagreed on whether these were substantive state interventions involving meaningful exchanges between labour and employer sides, or merely procedural ones that eased the ‘legitimation’ of neo-liberal reforms (Meardi, 2014).

Neo-liberalism, with Chicago school-inspired preference for minimal levels of state intervention, has been problematized by the Regulation School as corresponding with a shift in the model of accumulation (Hollingsworth and Boyer, 1997). With shifts away from the Fordist model of accumulation, different models of social regulation are necessary. While Fordism is often viewed as just a model of production, it involved an active role for the state in terms of maintaining social cohesion through managing aggregate demand and the welfare state. The neo-liberal model challenges this approach. As Howell (2005) highlights, neo-liberalism does not mean a lack of state intervention but a shift in state intervention in the direction of liberalizing markets and reducing the capacity for collective non-market actions.

This shift brings about changes in the three core functions of the state in employment relations. First, with the state as employer, there has clearly been a retreat in state activity in many areas. In particular, while many states are still actively involved in providing public services, this role has shifted from being direct providers to being the procurer of services, often from the for-profit or voluntary sectors. A shift in this area has been the fetishization of using private sector management methods through New Public Management and the harmful effect it may have on the quality of working life, as in the example analysed by Cunningham (2016) in this issue.

In terms of the substantive role of government, the development has been more change than retreat. Similarly, Cerny (1997, 1999) highlighted nearly 20 years ago the shift in state functions away from internal management of issues like aggregate demand towards what he labelled the ‘Competition State’. As such, the state was playing a central role in two domains of competition. First, internally, states increasingly play a central role in the marketization of all areas of economic life, including through actions such as introducing competitiveness into the provision of public and social services. Second, externally, through mechanisms designed to increase international competitiveness, states become locked into an international race to the bottom in an effort to engage in internationally competitive markets. In this special section, two articles pick up the theme of the ‘competition state’. First, Howell (2016) argues that states have been an essential part of the liberalization process by facilitating moves between regimes of accumulation. Second, Forde and Slater (2016) highlight how the Temporary Agency Work Directive, which was largely aimed at increasing regulation and equality within labour markets, was used by the UK state to embed increased competition. A common element of both arguments is that the state’s actions in the neo-liberal context are adapting to and driving forward processes of liberalization.

In terms of its procedural role, the state is also shifting its focus. In the immediate post-war period, the state was seen as legitimizing collective actions of employer and worker interest groups through the granting of a privileged public status. Howell (2005) also highlights how the Fordist period was underpinned by strong state support for collectivism. However, in recent times, in contexts such as both the US and the UK, the state has taken a much more active role in the decollectivization of social relations but through procedural means. For instance, at the time of writing, the UK Government in its Trade Union Bill was pushing, through the legislative process, a series of procedural restrictions on the rights of unions to take collective action. Similarly, in the US, ‘right to work’ laws in individual states have been used to play an active role in undermining union organizing attempts. This was particularly the case in the recent example of Volkswagen at its plant in Tennessee. At this plant, Volkswagen was thwarted in its efforts to establish a works council-type model through the use of right to work laws. Barron et al. (2016) highlight that in the right mix, restrictive state approaches can be used to bring about changes in categorization by labour movement actors but that such changes may be a temporary affair.

Inputs from welfare state and gender studies

Less central for the study of sociology of work has been the development of theories relating to the role of the state in employment through welfare policies, either directly or via effects on gender relations. The neglect of the welfare state, in particular in industrial relations, has resulted in a number of shortcomings, not least the inattention to gender issues, on which industrial relations interact most closely with legislation and welfare policies (O’Reilly and Spee, 1998). If at the peak of trade union power, industrial relations and social policy tended to be studied and discussed separately, the more recent shift of social policies towards activation and risk governance call for their closer integration (Crouch, 2015). In terms of state roles, the partial ‘decommodification’ of class relations through social citizenship (Esping-Andersen, 1990), the removal of issues such as pensions and health insurance from the table of collective bargaining, and compensatory effects on inequality among workforce groups are of enormous importance for the sociology of work and deserve much more attention.

Daly and Rake (2003: 11) summarize the insights of social policy, political economy and feminist literatures as positioning the welfare state as ‘the social face of the state’. This makes welfare state research central to analysis of the state, if we accept its above-mentioned conceptualization as ‘social power in its political form’ (Poggi, 1990). It points to developing an understanding of the state as a site of co-production of class, gender and racialized inequalities.

The starting point has been debates provoked by Esping-Andersen’s (1990, 1999) influential theory of social policy regimes and development of comparative typologies of welfare states (Arts and Gelissen, 2002; Lewis, 1992; Orloff, 1993). The strength and value of Esping-Andersen’s decommodification approach is reflected in its extensive research application. However, its implicit promise of explaining variation and/or similarity in state policies and outcomes has been critiqued for its androcentric universalism and limited recognition of gender dynamics in the politics that configure policies. This inability to capture the significance of gender relations to the construction and operation of welfare regimes (Duncan, 1995; Lewis, 1992) constrains understanding of state intercession in its nation’s class system. As Duncan puts it, the ‘pre-existing theoretical core’ of the regime model has as its dynamic centre ‘capital-labour divisions […] based around the relationship of [male, standard] workers to the market, as modified by the welfare state’. The crucial misdirection in this core dynamic is made visible in Pateman’s (1988) reconceptualization of the social contract as the sexual contract, which incorporates women into civil society as women rather than as person (man). For example, Daly and Rake’s (2003: 17) consideration of gender and the welfare state cites Pateman’s argument that equal citizenship for women would involve ‘attaching rights’ to care and that this is ‘impossible to achieve within the confines of a patriarchal welfare state’. While the explanatory power of patriarchy has also been extensively critiqued (see, for example, O’Reilly, 1996; Pollert, 1996), Pateman’s argument that unequal citizenship is the outcome of relations of subordination which enable exploitation, is a direction of causation effectively followed by Brown (2013) and Quadagno (2000) in their discussions of race and the welfare state. Quadagno’s closing remarks on the significance of race/ethnicity to a holistic understanding of social citizenship seem particularly apposite in light of current controversy in nation states over material help for refugees: ‘ascribed characteristics may be increasingly important in resource allocation’ (2000: 235).

However, multiple and ever-finer divisions of academic work have on balance not led to greater integration – and thus explanatory power – of this greater breadth of knowledge. Rather, it has been intermittent or additive. An example is Jessop’s (2004) article on the gender selectivities of the state, an approach not incorporated into his subsequent analyses. In the field of industrial relations, Danieli (2006: 332) argued strategies of ‘acknowledgement and abdication’ were deployed in relation to the analytical significance of gender. That is, acknowledging the (often, empirical) general importance of gender while simultaneously positing its lack of immediate (often, conceptual) significance. This echoes explicit and implicit calls for integrated analyses of the state by O’Reilly (2006) and which can be seen in Dickens’s (1998, 2000, 2007) work on interconnected state/legal, employer and trade union effects on equality issues.

O’Reilly (2006: 745) argues that restructuring of economies, labour markets and welfare programmes means typologies focused on past (industrial) forms of work organization are no longer plausible approaches to capturing complex non-standard employment and workforce diversity issues. As her evaluation of un-gendered cross-national comparative research notes: ‘When women enter the picture it disturbs the results about the prominent characteristics of each employment system’ (2006: 733). This critique of ascribed neutrality is of course methodologically significant. It points to the necessity of a consideration of gender being integrated into research decisions, but, also, it has implications for comparative research by pointing to the interdependencies between work relations, gender (and care) relations and welfare policies. Rubery (2009: 193) refines theorizing of political economy in her argument that the Varieties of Capitalism framework fails to account for the fact that complementary institutional arrangements can produce instability as well as stability. Thus, the interrelation of production, welfare and family systems means that although each is ‘shaped by different agendas […] changes in one sphere create ripple or domino effects within another’. Therefore, extending O’Reilly’s (2006) analysis, sets of typologies that focus on one dimension of the socio-economic system – the firm-orientation approach of ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ or Esping-Andersen’s (1990) original focus on welfare – are not usefully sustainable.

Sensitivity to the realities of social relations can help explain welfare state development and, in particular, as Daly and Rake (2003: 18) argue: ‘care can be employed to trace patterns across spheres’. Effects of motherhood have been the traditional focus of gendered welfare regime studies (see discussion in Brush, 2002). However, Naldini et al. (2016), in this issue, focus on a relatively under-explored area that will increasingly dominate national discussions: that of care of older citizens. Many debates on typologies of the state’s welfare activities have directly or implicitly focused on the explanatory gaps left by failure to integrate macro and micro analyses. Naldini et al. engage with this issue through their multilevel analysis of Eurobarometer micro-data across 21 countries. This surfaces the role of mid-life women in the care of frail elderly parents, its effects on employment decisions taken by mid-life women, and the analytical relevance to these decisions of interrelation of institutional and cultural dimensions of states. The article draws attention to important internal categories of those dimensions, exploring policies in relation to services and cash transfers; culture in relation to norms of gender and intergenerational relations; and the dynamics of their interrelation. As Naldini et al. (2016) note, analytical separation of these policy and culture influences is difficult and requires longitudinal research focus, but is necessary to understand the importance of context in a more holistic and therefore explanatory way. Their work contributes to scholarship that recognizes the heterogeneous specificities of women’s experiences, while tracing their commonalities to gender relations and thus a more coherent picture of the form and impact of the state.

Conclusion

Twenty years ago, in her sociologically and, in particular, Weberian-inspired approach to international political economy, Strange (1996) theorized the ‘retreat of the state’. A few financial and currency crises after, and with many border fences and walls erected, the talk is now more about state resurgence. With regard to shaping the processes and outcomes of work, the state remains without doubt an important player. Yet, it is clear that a number of discontinuities have taken place in all of its three main roles, that its influence on the way people conceive work is different from the Weberian bureaucratic one, and that its contribution to the perpetuation or removal of inequality is ever changing.

The state is a fertile ground for research in the intersection of the arenas of work, employment and society. Without any presumption to exhaustiveness, this review of traditions and new developments points to a few particularly promising directions for future research.

First, over the past 15 years, a key observation has been the shift in terms of rights at work from the collective to the individual level (Colling, 2006; Dickens and Hall, 2006). Much of this research has focused on union and organizational consequences of this shift. However, there are important state-level implications that also need to be developed in more detail. While Howell (2015) sees this development as an essentially instrumental legitimation of neo-liberalism, many of these developments, including non-discrimination rights and higher minimum wages, are also both a product and a factor of renewed politicization of work issues. As such, they are themselves, sociologically speaking, a contested field that cannot be easily reduced to functionalist accounts. The fact that some of these individual rights are introduced by governments with a neo-liberal flavour does not automatically produce a neo-liberal outcome, not least because the labour market remains too socially embedded to correspond passively to neo-liberal design. New forms of aggregation, mobilization and communication of workers around individual rights, whether in competition, indifference or collaboration with established forms of labour movements, are emerging social processes that call for both sociological sensitivity and attention to the state. The rights of agency workers, one of the extreme forms of precarization examined by Forde and Slater in this section, is one interesting example that points to both opportunities from below and constraints from state institutions (Pulignano et al., 2015).

Second, the interaction of the state with the internationalization of both capital and labour is a problematic issue with important theory and policy implications, as particularly visible in the EU (Meardi, 2012). Multinational corporations have become omnipresent across the globe. While ‘regime competition’ has been a key feature of research, both at national and regional levels (Cremers et al., 2007; Monaghan et al., 2014) in terms of attracting investment, the understanding of how states manage these relationships is rather underdeveloped. For instance, the relationship between state governance and the rise of ‘private governance’ in global supply chains (Donaghey et al., 2014; Hassel, 2008) is only just emerging and therefore still to be studied, possibly with the contribution of multilevel global governance lenses (Meardi and Marginson, 2014). New approaches are emerging which may explicitly avoid states (Reinecke and Donaghey, 2015), but this itself raises important issues about the nature of the state in these circumstances. Third, at the same time, the internationalization of labour supply through not only migration, but also the cross-border provision of services, calls not only for new forms of regulation but also reassembling of state borders. As Ferrera (2006), following Rokkan and thereby Weber, has argued, migrants are a sort of acid test for the definition of social solidarity. Current debates on the rights of refugees, of mobile EU workers and of the undocumented migrants analysed by Barron et al. in this issue point at the possibility of a state-led redefinition of workers’ hierarchies that may have enormous implications for organizations as well as society.

Fourth, the reformulation of both welfare state policies and public sector work under the simultaneous conditions of ageing populations and of fiscal crisis (including so-called ‘austerity’ policies) should be studied with simultaneous attention to effects on the active and inactive population, as in the article by Naldini and colleagues in this section. The shifting of debt from private to public and back to private hands, as with the collapse of ‘privatized Keynesianism’ and reforms of pension systems (Crouch, 2015), is evidence of the role of the state for social compromises not only between classes but also between generations and genders – and, also, of the intrinsic instability of those compromises. One tendency may well be the old one Braverman (1974) focused on – work intensification, deskilling of care work, and more state-supported accumulation – but it is up to sociologists to investigate to what extent, with what effects, and with what contradictions the state may go down that route.