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Paper short abstract

Drawing on a cross-country study of disability benefit claims, this paper explores “welfare thresholds” where diagnoses are politicised. It shows how welfare regimes validate forms of knowledge that shape disability, chronicity, and work capacity in relation to the right and obligation to work.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how disability and chronicity emerge within contemporary welfare systems, not as stable categories but as shifting and contested relations. Drawing on an ERC-funded comparative study of out-of-work benefit claimants in the UK, Estonia, Norway, Spain, and Hungary, we focus on ‘welfare thresholds’: moments where diagnoses do socio-political work, mediating access to income, legitimacy, and (time away from) paid employment.

Across welfare regimes, disability and chronicity are tied to work capacity in different and often contradictory ways. In some contexts, unemployment becomes increasingly medicalised, with diagnoses functioning as necessary justifications for not working. Elsewhere, the legitimacy of ‘incapacity’ is progressively eroded, narrowing the right not to work. In both cases, diagnostic categories are stretched and compressed by state institutions, third-sector organisations, and claimants, as people navigate repeated assessments, shifting expectations of recovery, and demands to present their conditions as either temporary or enduring.

These negotiations unfold within welfare arrangements where care, labour, and social value are continually recalibrated. Our paper attends to how different forms of knowledge within these systems are authorised and validated across intersecting value regimes and bureaucratic systems of healthcare and welfare. Based on longitudinal interviews with 20 participants per country over six months, complemented by digital ethnography, the paper shows how shifting thresholds around diagnosis and work capacity reshape identities, relationships, and imagined futures. Disability and chronicity emerge here not as fixed states, but as relational and chronopolitical effects of welfare regimes that variously medicalise unemployment, demand productivity, or withdraw recognition altogether.