Informed by institutional theories of microfoundations, this study elucidates how employment service caseworkers negotiated the configuration of welfare conditionality based on age, thereby establishing a microfoundation for policies aimed at extending job-seeking lives. Through conducting in-depth interviews with twenty-four frontline social workers and a context-mechanism-outcome analysis, the findings uncover how service providers incorporated age-specific considerations and redefined the meanings of work in later life. While organisational adjustments extended the service goals and mobilised extra resources, structural constraints forced caseworkers to adopt pragmatic attitudes towards workfare measures. Consequently, a ‘more-than-employment’ approach to older jobseekers was formulated concerned with age, relationship, and health. This research contributes to social policy studies by theorising welfare conditionality as a product of negotiated configuration that crafts the microfoundation of activation policies. Empirically, this study enriches the literature by linking extending job-seeking lives and older claimants to welfare conditionality within Hong Kong’s work-first model.

The article probes the analytical utility of the increasingly popular concept of ‘cognitive warfare’. It proceeds by reflecting writings associated with the concept’s mainstream meaning against selected insights from general strategic theory and affective science and finds cognitive warfare problematic in multiple aspects. From the perspective of general strategic theory, cognitive warfare misrepresents the nature of the challenge at hand, blurs the distinction between core aspects of strategic effort, and draws on questionable rather than sound strategic thought. From an affective science perspective, it relies on an increasingly outdated paradigm for explaining the human mind, provides little insight into how cognition shapes behaviour, and overlooks the beneficial roles of emotions in maintaining social cohesion. Integrating these perspectives, the article argues that information aggression is better understood as attempted subversion centred on specific emotions. The presented argument allows practitioners to better understand the nature of the challenges they face and to develop appropriate remedies, and academics to study the subject in a more focused manner.

In recent decades, theorists of disability rights have made the moral and legal case for supported decision-making. Whereas surrogate decision-making, the long upheld legal standard, looks to a third party to make a decision for a person deemed to lack the capacity to make that decision for themselves, support in decision-making empowers that person to make their own decisions. In this article, we argue for a significant shift in the norms governing enrollment in clinical trials. Rather than assume that support is only appropriate for individuals who cannot independently make sufficiently informed enrollment decisions, we propose “support in decision-making for all” when research protocols are beyond a certain risk threshold. Drawing inspiration from the universal design movement and feminist insights about autonomy, we argue that making support in decision-making the presumption has substantial expressive and practical benefits, and better empowers all potential research participants to make more informed, autonomous decisions.

This paper examines how practices of validation linked epistemic authority to administrative power, transforming procedures of science into instruments of governance. In the 1880s, US government chemists founded the Association of Official Agricultural Chemists (AOAC) to resolve conflicting fertilizer analyses and secure public authority over commercial chemistry. Through multi-laboratory studies, the AOAC adopted methods that were judged to produce uniform results – a process later known as ‘validation’. In doing so, the AOAC transformed methodological agreement into a foundation for national regulation and helped define analytical chemistry as a trusted instrument of governance. Nearly a century later, in the 1970s, the AOAC attempted to apply similar principles to toxicity testing but failed: most toxicologists resisted standardization, and methodological uniformity did not yield uniform results. Where the AOAC faltered, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) succeeded, convening scientists and regulators across the industrialized world to establish standard methods for evaluating chemical risk. While the AOAC’s original validation system defended public authority against industrial interests, the OECD’s framework reinforced industry centrality by restricting regulatory legitimacy to ‘validated’ studies. Together these cases reveal how validation translated consensus into authority and aligned scientific reliability with political and economic order.