In between competing discourses: the disabled employee as a productive agent

Abstract

This article explores how workers with disabilities in one Flemish organization deal with societal and organizational discourses that contradict one another. On the one hand, the move from welfare to work and its strong emphasize on labour market activation of minorities brings along a discourse of participation through paid employment. On the other hand employers are reluctant to hire or promote people with disabilities because they have been historically burdened by a discourse of unproductiveness. Performance is key in organizations, yet disabled people are by definition defined by what they cannot perform. How individuals themselves engage with these colliding discourses and retain a positive sense of their productivity is the focus of this paper. Through the use of semi-structured in-depth interviews with twelve wage-subsidized employees with disabilities, issues of productivity are elaborated on. The findings show that when traditional quantitative concepts of productivity were used, employees had to use a number of strategies to retain a positive sense of self. Some participants used a broadening of the concept of productivity in order to construct a competent professional self.