 The above discussion of the concept of alienation—clarifying its basic shape, sketching some of its theoretical forms, and introducing a few complexities—still leaves many issues unresolved. These include many empirical and quasi-empirical issues. The present section is concerned with some of the empirical assumptions and claims that appear in what might be called broadly philosophical accounts of alienation of the kind discussed above. It is not directly concerned with the extensive social scientific literature on alienation. That latter literature is often preoccupied with ‘operationalising’ the concept—for instance, treating job satisfaction or absenteeism as proxies of alienated work—in order to engineer predictive models in disciplines (including education, psychology, sociology, and management studies) dealing with a variety of real world contexts (see e.g. Chiaburu et al 2014).