Disabled at Work: Body-Centric Cycles of Meaning-Making

A 22-month longitudinal study of (self)employed disabled workers (Following the preference of the lead author who identifies as disabled, the linguistic self-presentation by our participants, the precedent of (Hein and Ansari, Academy of Management Journal 65:749–783, 2022), and the clarification note included in Jammaers & Zanoni’s recent review of ableism (Jammaers and Zanoni, Organization Studies 42:429–452, 2021), we chose, and consistently use, the term “disabled employees” throughout the paper. We do so to underscore the premise of the social model of disability, which explains that “people are disabled first and foremost by society, not by their individual, biological impairment. To us this term most clearly highlights that it is society (and possibly organizations) that disable and oppress people with impairments, by preventing their access, integration and inclusion to all walks of life, making them ‘disabled’.” (Jammaers and Zanoni, Organization Studies 42:429–452, 2021: 448)) models the growing centrality of the body in meaning-making. We inductively explain how body dramas of suffering or thriving initially instigate cycles of meaning deflation and inflation at work. Our disjunctive process model shows that, at the beginning of the pandemic, disabled workers performed either dramas of suffering or on dramas of thriving. However, as the global pandemic unfolded, disabled workers begun crafting composite dramas that deliberately juxtaposed thriving and suffering. This conjunctive process model stabilized meaning-making at work by acknowledging the duality of the disabled body, as both anomaly and asset. Our findings elaborate, and bridge, emerging theories of body work and recursive meaning-making to explain how disabled workers explicitly enroll their bodies to make meaning at work during periods of societal upheaval.