This article offers an investigation of social policy discourse with specific regard to the ways in which interventions aimed at addressing poverty and social inequality have conceptualised welfare, social assistance and social security. It argues that the post-1994 African National Congress (ANC)-led government has placed a priority on waged employment and labour ...

A normative association of waged work with ideas of dignity and personal responsibility was central to the elaboration of the 'labour question' by the institutions of white rule in early 20th-century South Africa. Colonial work ethic sustained representations of the 'native' as a productive agent for whom promises of progress and modernisation (deriving from econom...