Incivility, Ostracism, and Social Climate Surveys Through the Lens of Disabled People: A Scoping Review

Incivility and civility have been studied for more than a century across disciplines and in many areas ranging from workplaces to communication, the digital world, and everyday life. They are often used to the detriment of marginalized groups. Their negative use is seen to set the groundwork for other negative treatments, such as bullying and harassment, impacting the social climate in a negative way. Ostracism is seen to be linked to incivility. Disabled people disproportionally face negative treatments, such as bullying and harassment, and experience a negative social climate, as highlighted by the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities, suggesting that they also disproportionately experience incivility and ostracism. Climate surveys aim to expose toxic social climate in workplaces, schools, and communities caused by incivility, ostracism, bullying, and harassment. As such, how incivility, civility, ostracism, and the design of climate surveys are discussed in the literature is of importance to disabled people. We could find no review that analyzed the use of climate surveys beyond individual surveys and the concepts of incivility and ostracism in relation to disabled people. The objective of our study was to contribute to filling this gap by analyzing the academic literature present in SCOPUS, EBSCO HOST (70 databases), and Web of Science, performing keyword frequency and content analysis of abstracts and full texts. Our findings provide empirical evidence for a systemic neglect of disabled people in the topics covered: from 21,215 abstracts mentioning “civilit*” or “incivilit*”, only 14 were relevant, and of the 8358 abstracts mentioning ostracism, only 26 were relevant. Of the 3643 abstracts mentioning “climate surveys,” 12 sources covered disabled people by focusing on a given survey, but not one study performed an evaluation of the utility of climate surveys for disabled people in general. Racism is seen as a structural problem facilitating civility/incivility. Ableism, the negative judgments of a given set of abilities someone has, and disablism, the systemic discrimination based on such judgments, are structural problems experienced by disabled people, facilitating civility/incivility. However, ableism generated only 2 hits, and disablism/disableism had no hits. Most of our sources focused on workplace incivility, and authors were mostly from the USA. We found no linkage to social and policy discourses that aim to make the social environment better, such as equity, diversity, and inclusion, well-being, and science and technology governance. This is the first paper of its kind to look in depth at how the academic literature engages with the concepts of civility, incivility, and ostracism and with the instrument of social climate surveys in relation to disabled people. Our findings can be used by many different disciplines and fields to strengthen the theoretical and practical discussions on the topics in relation to disabled people and beyond.