Blind Spots in Employers' Practices: How Institutional Ethnography May Help in the Rethinking of Labour Market Inclusion Policies for Persons with Disabilities

This paper reviews the social scientific research on labour market inclusion policies for persons with disabilities and argues in favour of institutional ethnography (IE) in the subject area. More specifically this paper explores the missed opportunity to show how inequities in labour market participation for persons with disabilities actually happen, reviews the state of the art in studies of labour market inclusion policies for persons with disabilities, and provide examples from Norway of how IE adds a different perspective to the study of labour market inclusion policies for persons with disabilities. First one strand of the literature has examined and compared the national policies, including policies to ensure or encourage employers to recruit and retain persons with disabilities, and the policy outcomes. Second, other scholars have examined the experiences and practices of employers. A third strand of the literature has examined the adjustments of persons with disabilities themselves to the labour market. Fourth scholars have analysed the organization of the social services provided to job-seekers and employers to enhance the labour market participation of persons with disabilities. Yet, surprisingly little is known about how the institutional relations work and how they might be resisted by employers; i.e. the interaction processes between employers, the public welfare administration and the employees with disabilities (reduced working capacity). The paper argues that IE offers a method of inquiry to unpack how employers relate to institutional expectations to persons with need for accommodation in the workplace. The paper concludes that IE has the potential to enrich the research area on labour market inclusion as it explores the connection between the local setting of recruitment processes and the institutional or translocal order that shape these processes.