Ableism at work: able-bodiedness and disability in workers’ subjection in three organizational regimes of truth

Abstract

Reconnecting the notion of ableism to the literature on socio-ideological control, this paper investigates how the disabled/able-bodied1 binary informs organizational truth regimes. Drawing on the cases of a public agency, a bank, and a local government body, we analyze how organizations rely on specific representations of disabled subjects to normalize specific representations of the ideal worker as able-bodied. Disabled workers’ own positioning within each truth regime, albeit heterogeneous, fail as a whole to question ableism. The study advances the research on disability at work by showing how ableism normalizes able-bodiedness in organization-specific ways. It hereby qualifies the well-established, broader idea that ableism fosters the production of neo-liberal subjectivity. The study further advances the critical management literature by showing how ableism is enjoined in the dynamics of socio-ideological control. Akin to gender and racio-ethnicity, ableism operates as an organizing principle producing normalcy and subordinate alterity inside the workplace.