1. Introduction; 2. The skills impasse and an activity approach; 3. Taylorism – re-engaging with an enduring influence; 4. Historical meditations in the making of Taylorism in contemporary state social services work; 5. Experiencing the de-skilling premises of welfare work; 6. De-skilling – learning welfare work and the meditations of space, time, and distance; 7. Re-skilling, consenting, and the engrossments of administrative knowledge; 8. Up-skilling, resisting, and re-keying for craft knowledge; 9. Divisions of knowledge production, group formation, and occupational acculturation; 10. Understanding prevalence, roots, and factors of trajectories of knowledge production; 11. Mind in political economy and the labour process – a use-value thesis; Appendix.