Governing impaired jobseekers in neoliberal societies: From sheltered employment to individual placement

Abstract

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.

Social Integrative Enterprises and the Construction of an Impaired Lumpenproletariat – a Swedish Case Study

“…The critical model of disability is more promising in this regard (e.g. Holmqvist et al 2013; Foster and Wass, 2013; Goodley, 2014; Jammears et al, 2016; Maravelias, 2020; Mik-Meyer, 2016; Shakespeare, 2006). Generally, the critical model of disability uses the term “ableism” to frame its’ approach (e.g.…”

“…Through this notion of ableism, the critical model of disability criticizes the social model for its alleged failure to acknowledge how also impairments are socially constructed against the background of ableist ideals. The social model’s failure to consider how individuals become designated as impaired is alleged of having made impairments an exclusive medical consideration (Goodley, 2014; Holmqvist, et al, 2013; Maravelias, 2020; Tremain, 2015).…”

“…The study is part of a larger study of new forms of inclusion and exclusion in contemporary labour markets. I studied a large state-owned ISE during 2015–2016 and accounted for this study in Maravelias (2020). The study accounted for below represents a continuation and deepening of that study.…”

Stratification in a Neoliberal Society: The Making of Elites and Occupationally Disabled in Contemporary Sweden

“…Hence, medicalization in an elite community earns much more positive returns than the one that takes place in Samhall’s world, illustrating the fact that for some groups in society medicalization is a mechanism of consecration; for others a mechanism of desecration. Indeed, in a neoliberal society, where all is about enacting “the enterprising self,” health and disability becomes a social, rather than medical issue: active; entrepreneurial, self-managing people are considered healthy, which is typical of elite business school students and other elite groups (see Anteby, 2013; Schleef, 2006); while those that don’t display such characteristics are considered unhealthy and disabled (see Bauman, 2007; Holmqvist et al, 2013; Maravelias, 2020).…”

“…During the last years, organization sociologists have examined neoliberalism in terms of the construction of “employable people,” stressing individuals’ “entrepreneurial” and “self-managing capabilities” as critical factors for their attractiveness on today’s labor markets (e.g. Alvesson and Willmott, 2002; Fleming and Sturdy, 2009; Holmqvist et al, 2013; Maravelias, 2020). Neoliberalism, which emphasizes people’s individual capabilities to act and choose rationally, idealizes certain human qualities and characteristics that are different variations of the theme activity (e.g.…”