How Work Works on Work as a Dispositive

This paper engages with recent debates about the value and future of work by proposing a shift in perspective: instead of asking whether work is normatively good or bad, the focus is placed on how work operates. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of the dispositive, I conceptualise work as a historically specific and strategic arrangement of discourses, institutions, practices, and norms that binds individuals to the social world. Using Kathi Weeks’ theory of work’s antinomies, I show how contradiction is not incidental to work but central to its mode of operation. This framework makes it possible to reassess both contemporary attempts to recover the moral worth of work and post-work imaginaries that aim to abolish it. The paper argues that prominent normative accounts of work (e.g. Honneth, Gheaus and Herzog) overlook the mechanisms through which work is constituted as meaningful, while post-work theories, though politically generative, tend to underestimate the infrastructural and affective grip of the work dispositive. Reframing work as a dispositive thus offers a more critical and nuanced account of how it continues to shape subjectivity, social order, and ethical life—even in its imagined absence.