ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to assess the ontological basis of economic theory within the tension of two paradigms: the Employment paradigm as described in Chapter 1 and the emergence of the Work paradigm as described in Chapter 2. Theory is never objective. It is as Robert Cox aptly put it, ‘always for someone and for some purpose’.2 Within the Employment paradigm, economy was shaped by three ontological categories: rationalism, dualism and metanarrative. Each of these ontological stances was integral to the epistemological development of an essentialized economy that deterritorialized work and reterritorialized it as employment in order to secure capitalist hegemony.3 In other words, employment is a produced reality associated with the broader history of capitalist development. Similarly the gendered division of labour that produced the male-breadwinner and female-carer model was not an objective outcome but a produced one associated with the Employment paradigm.
