%0 Journal Article %T The Aesthetics of Work %A Josien Arts %A Marguerite van den Berg %J Work, Employment and Society %@ 1469-8722 %D 2019 %R 10.1177/0950017018758196 %X Recent legislation in the Netherlands takes conditional welfare to a new level. Local welfare offices can now give benefit sanctions to welfare clients that ¡®obstruct employment¡¯ by their appearance. Through a qualitative and ethnographic study of aesthetic evaluation practices in Dutch welfare offices it is argued that: (1) an everyday aesthetic labour is pivotal in post-Fordist labour markets; (2) in times of precarization, this is so for unemployed as well as formally employed populations; (3) welfare clients are expected to give an aesthetic performance of work-readiness and adaptability; and (4) case managers use aesthetics as a pedagogy to achieve this readiness and adaptability. Aesthetic labour, it is then argued, is best conceptualized as a continuous, everyday, backstage labour for labour: a daily calibration for work contexts in flux %K aesthetic labour %K conditional welfare %K pedagogies %K policy implementation %K post-Fordism %K precarization %K responsibilization %U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0950017018758196