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Summary
This thesis explores work inclusion as a practice in which the tension related to disability – that between its deficit understandings and its ability understandings – is central. Deficit understandings relate to how labour and welfare services categorise people, contributing to the development of ideas of disability as rendering one unfit to work and/or the identification of individual deficits, leading to support.
Deficit understandings also relate to labour market productivity demands, which constitute the specific expectations of a productive and efficient labourer who is ready to work. Conversely, ability understandings imply that skills and competencies leading to paid work constitute valuable elements of employability. Additionally, disability can, on its own, be perceived as a valued human resource, such as in businesses organising user-led personal assistance. If deficit understandings are too dominant, skills and competencies may be less visible.
If ability understandings are too dominant, awareness of challenges and the facilitation of adjustments in the environment could be reduced. The research question in this thesis is underpinned by the observation of a tension between disability in terms of deficit and ability understandings. I explore this tension through an interview-based study: How does the tension between disability as a deficit and as an ability play out for two actors contributing to work inclusion for disabled people: frontline workers implementing work inclusion policies and social entrepreneurs prioritising the hiring of disabled people?
In article 1, the tension between deficit and ability understandings of disability plays out as the entrepreneurs strive to move beyond a deficit understanding. They strive to exceed the deficit understanding by pointing at the labour and welfare services as having othering effects and thus creating a divide between those who receive such services and those who do not receive them. Entrepreneurs use this problematization to promote alternative collective understandings of disability.
In article 2, I explore frontline workers’ narrative practices in an institutional use of stories, which the workers conceptualise as success stories about work inclusion. The success stories are interpreted as a strategic effort that balances the tension between deficit understandings and ability understandings. The stories exist in an ambiguous borderland between an acknowledgment of disabled people as contributing citizens on the one hand, and subtle tendencies to overvalue motivation and achievement that can be exclusionary for those who do not try hard enough on the other hand. The article introduces the term ableist paradox to capture the way the frontline workers’ stories demonstrate paradoxical understandings.
In article 3, I compare entrepreneurs’ and frontline workers’ frames of disabled people as contributing and productive. In frontline workers resource frame, that implies a search for disabled people’s strengths and competencies, a language change from users to candidates, and problematization of disability as a useful concept in work inclusion also takes place.Within a participation frame, entrepreneurs problematize a user position that they believe disabled people are often being placed in and suggest entrepreneurship as an opportunity to exceed such a position. In their valuation frame, the acknowledgment of certain groups of disabled people as contributing to employment is central. Here, entrepreneurs challenge normality-based assumptions belonging to the typical labourer.
I interpret the entrepreneurs as expressing interest in the representation of marginalised groups of disabled people. I use the term activist entrepreneur in article 3 to clarify this interpretation. The concept of activist is understood in a broad sense – that is, to resist deficit understandings related to disability by highlighting the collective interests of the groups of disabled people with whom the activist entrepreneurs have engaged. Such a conceptualisation of entrepreneurship will be an important addition to the study of participation in the design of work inclusion policies. Social entrepreneurship among disabled people may represent such an arena.
Traditionally, disabled people have been, and are still, discriminated against in the labour market for insufficient productivity. As the relationship between disability and reduced work capacity is reversed by exploring new images of disabled people as productive and capable workers, a basis for new empirical knowledge and academic theorisation is provided. An introduction to and exploration of work inclusion as processing a tension between deficit understandings and ability understandings demonstrates such professional development
