Governing impaired jobseekers in neoliberal societies

From sheltered employment to individual placement

Bibliographic Data

ID20499705
AuthorsChristian Maravelias (0000-0002-7737-6968, Stockholm University, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume29
Issue6
Pages1036-1055
Publication date2022-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueOrganization (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1350-5084 • E-ISSN: 1461-7323
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/1350508420970476
OpenAlexW3112620396
LanguageEN
Citations received14
References cited40

This paper accounts for a study of the largest employer in Scandinavia of jobseekers with designated impairments. Like many similar organizations, this organization has undergone a transformation from a provider of ‘sheltered work programs’, which remove this category of jobseekers from the labour market, to a provider of ‘individual placement programs’, which instead integrates them in the labour market. I use Foucauldian governmentality studies to show how this transformation problematizes basic assumptions underlying organizational disability studies. While these studies are variegated, they have generally found that jobseekers with designated impairments are often treated as disabled, as less employable than non-impaired individuals and in need of care and rehabilitation. The study presented below points in another direction. It shows that jobseekers’ designated impairments are treated as signs of their special abilities for particular jobs, rather than as signs of their disabilities. These findings, I argue, are illustrative of how a neoliberal governmentality tends towards replacing the distinction between the able and the disable with a bio-medical structuring of different qualities of human capital. While it leads to that individuals with impairments are integrated in the labour market, I argue that it also leads to that they are treated as having an exclusive, medically designated fit for simple and often dirty labour

Business · Economic growth · Economics · Governmentality · Human capital · Labour economics · Political economy · Political science · Precarity · Public relations · Sociology · Structuring · Disability Education and Employment · Gender Studies · Healthcare innovation and challenges · Law · Retirement, Disability, and Employment

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