ABSTRACT
This chapter examines welfare work as a social relation putting forth critique of the government that welfare work is part of. It explores how welfare workers addressing immigrants and refugees struggle with their roles and refuse to be subjected to the logic of modern welfare work, including its racialisation processes. The chapter focuses on two aspects of the societal form of critique and interpret what society these aspects seem to strive for through sociation processes. The two aspects are a modern critique leading to maximisation of welfare as it is and a postmodern critique questioning the foundation for the standards governing maximisation and optimisation. The modern social critique bears witness to paradoxes of welfare work and its sociation endeavour. Modern critique crystallises the unmodern or premodern in the modernisation of the individual, which helps modern welfare be itself, postmodern critique as an internal contradiction questioning the foundations also helps modern welfare be itself.
