Hossein Jorjani
First publication: 2026 – 07 – 16
Discussions of work commonly refer to institutionally organized human productive activity rather than to productive activity in the broader biological sense. This distinction is easily overlooked, leading social institutions to be credited—or blamed—for conditions that arise from more fundamental biological constraints.
The necessity of productive activity long predates humanity. Animals also obtain food, construct shelters, defend territories, rear offspring, and in many species cooperate through elaborate divisions of labour. Productive activity, understood as the expenditure of effort to secure survival and reproduction, is therefore a general feature of living organisms rather than a uniquely human invention.
What distinguishes human work is not the existence of productive activity but the institutional forms through which it is organized. Property, exchange, political authority, markets, legal systems, and increasingly complex divisions of labour mediate the relationship between effort and biological need. Unlike most other animals, humans typically work for wages or other symbolic forms of compensation rather than for the immediate products of their labour, and those products reach them only through extensive systems of exchange.
The methodological consequence is that institutions should be compared with alternative institutional arrangements rather than with an imagined absence of productive effort. A person who escapes an oppressive social order—whether the legendary Robin Hood retreating to Sherwood Forest or a family living beyond the reach of state authority—may alter the social organization of work, but not the biological necessity of obtaining food, shelter, protection, and the means of survival. The burden of productive activity remains, although its distribution, organization, and rewards may change.
The same distinction appears elsewhere in human affairs. Reproduction, for example, always entails biological costs, whether in humans or zebras, but societies differ profoundly in how those costs are distributed among families, markets, and public institutions. Likewise, work is rooted in biological necessity, while its concrete forms are institutionally determined. Confusing these two levels risks attributing to social institutions what properly belongs to biology, or overlooking the genuine ways in which institutions redistribute, intensify, or alleviate the burdens that biology imposes.
Hossein Jorjani 