Socio-Economic Decoupling and the Post-Labour Legitimacy Problem

Description

This Zenodo record brings together four interlinked papers that collectively address the problem of institutional legitimacy under conditions of socio-economic decoupling, where labour no longer functions as a reliable proxy for contribution, recognition, or social standing.

Taken together, the papers form a coherent research programme spanning diagnosis, institutional design, and measurement. They are intended to be read as a structured sequence, though each paper is independently complete.

Paper I — Diagnosis

Labour, Legitimacy, and the End of the Work-Based Social Contract
This paper diagnoses the structural breakdown of the labour–legitimacy linkage in advanced economies. It shows how employment has historically served as a proxy for legitimacy, and why automation, surplus production, and labour displacement render this proxy unstable, exclusionary, and increasingly coercive.

Paper II — Conceptual Framework

Judgment-Anchored Framework for Post-Labour Social Legitimacy
This paper proposes a successor framework in which legitimacy is anchored not to employment, but to judgment, attribution, and exchange. It defines the judgment attribution problem and outlines the conditions under which recognition can remain legitimate when work is no longer the primary organising category.

Paper III — Institutional Design

Institutional Design for Post-Labour Social Legitimacy
This paper specifies the institutional mechanisms required to operationalise judgment-anchored legitimacy, including attribution bodies, procedural safeguards, and anti-capture constraints. It focuses on municipal-scale institutions as bounded, testable sites for post-labour legitimacy reconstruction.

Paper IV — Measurement and Falsifiability

Measuring Legitimacy Under Post-Labour Conditions
This paper completes the architecture by making legitimacy operationally measurable and falsifiable. It defines legitimacy as a procedural system property and derives a minimal, gaming-resistant indicator suite, including the attribution contestation rate as a flagship metric. It specifies data architecture, baseline construction, comparative evaluation, and explicit failure modes.

Scope and Intent

The programme is deliberately procedural rather than normative. It does not prescribe distributive outcomes, moral values, or policy goals. Instead, it provides a framework for determining whether institutions remain contestable, intelligible, non-monopolistic, and non-coercive under post-labour conditions.

The four papers together establish:

• a structural diagnosis of labour-based legitimacy erosion,

• a successor conceptual framework,

• a concrete institutional design,

• and a falsifiable measurement instrument.

This record is intended as prior art, evaluative infrastructure, and a basis for empirical testing, not as a manifesto or closed doctrine. Legitimacy claims made under post-labour conditions can now be examined, compared, and rejected on empirical grounds.

This research is produced independently under the Drive-In s.r.o. research programme.
Readers who wish to support its continuation may do so here: https://ko-fi.com/johnryder99892