A critical analysis of historical and contemporary discourses around worklessness, economic inactivity, and the factors that contribute to people withdrawing from the conventional labor market. 

How do we define and respond to worklessness? This book combines analysis of media and political narratives around worklessness and factors that limit individuals’ capacity for conventional paid work—from disability and long-term illness to caring responsibilities—with interviews that shed light on the lived experience of so-called economic inactivity.

In dissecting popular portrayals of “the workless” in the present and tracing the historical evolution of discourses around “inactivity”—especially work-limiting disability—James Morrison draws heavily on sociological theories of stigma and symbolic annihilation. Conceptualising the contemporary narrative about the UK’s supposed crisis in economic inactivity as the latest in a continuum of periodic moral panics about worklessness, he argues that neoliberal definitions of work and worklessness are too narrow, as they deny—and render invisible—the importance of various forms of unpaid labor performed by many people classified as “inactive,” notably informal caregiving and volunteering.