Research Seminar by Eline JAMMAERS

Research seminar by Eline JAMMAERS, Assistant Professor, UCLouvain. 

« Managers and entrepreneurs with disabilities: a research agenda »

In the last decades, scholars in management and organization studies have begun to unravel the reasons for why disabled people remain disadvantaged in the labor market, despite increasing legislative frameworks and employers’ engagement with diversity management. Although most of these studies have taken a positivist, socio-psychological approach (see for instance Stone & Colella’s 2005 seminal paper), a growing number of scholars engages more critically with disability, seeing it as a social construction and separating it from a person’s biological impairment. Drawing on a discursive lens, cultural understanding of disability have located the problem of un(der)employment within existing negative representations of disabled people as less productive workers (see Jammaers, Zanoni & Hardonk, 2016), which have become even more threatening in neoliberal times of austerity, marked by increasing individualization and drawback of state support. Some disabled people manage to destabilize such preconceived ideas by taking up positions that are historically reserved for the ideal, able-bodied male worker (Acker, 2006). For instance, managerial or leadership roles and entrepreneurial activities are typically seen as unattainable for people living with disabilities or chronic illnesses. This research seminar outlines a research agenda for engaging with such topics, furthering the debates on disability in organizations beyond supported forms of employment or employment in salaried, low-level jobs.