Work, Law, and Vulnerability in Late Modernity: Changed Work Capacity and Institutional Exclusion through a Life-History Narrative

This article examines how the institutional and legal mechanisms of the late modern labour market shape the life course, social recognition, and labour-market participation of people with changed work capacity. It argues that these mechanisms not only regulate access to work and social protection but also actively produce vulnerability through moralized expectations and fragmented forms of legal governance. The theoretical framework draws on risk society theory, individualized responsibility, and critical disability studies. Conceptualizing disability, based on the experience of acquired functional loss, not as an individual deficit but as a socially and institutionally mediated position relative to a previously work-capable status, the analysis is based on a narrative life-history interview, interpreted as a hermeneutic and interpretive case using Didier Fassin’s framework of moral, legal, and institutional evaluation. The study shows how work becomes a moral obligation, how legal classification and administrative routines function as gatekeeping practices through which institutional exclusion is reproduced, how institutional exclusion is reproduced through legal and administrative practices, and how the ethos of independence and a helping identity are organized simultaneously as resources of agency and as mechanisms of self-responsibilization within experiences of changed work capacity in late modern societies.