Alter-European Journal of Disability Research最新文献

People with mental health problems face barriers to labour market inclusion. In this study, we investigate the extent to which employers are attentive and willing to include young people with mental health problems. The study contributes to existing knowledge by exploring contextual factors that shape employers’ hiring behaviour. The findings show that taking on a social responsibility to contribute to an inclusive working life (as indicated by having entered the Norwegian Inclusive Working Life Agreement) and the degree to which recruitment practices are formalised (as indicated by labour market sector) is positively associated with enterprises’ inclusiveness towards young people with mental health problems. However, the general tendency is that few enterprises focus on including young people with mental health problems. Likewise, only a few enterprises would invite a qualified applicant with such problems to a job interview. Thus, our study supports research suggesting that employer reluctance towards hiring persons with mental health problems contributes to the latter's labour market disadvantages.

Different policies relating to the employment of disabled people coexist in France. They rely on various mechanisms, such as quotas, non-discrimination, professional rehabilitation that corresponds to concurrent, or even antagonist, definitions of disability and participation in the labor market. Based on two original qualitative sociological surveys conducted by semi-structured interviews, this article explores how disability officers grasp, or do not grasp, the different legal tools available to implement employment policies for people with disabilities in public sector work organizations. Despite the strong persistence of an individual, medical, and defective approach to disability in employment, we show that disability officers strive to build a more ambitious, proactive, and systemic policy. They are sensitive to the environmental dimension of disability and to the prevention of disability at work, but do not make reference to the antidiscrimination law and its injunction to pursue equality and inclusion.

Decommodification, or the ability to maintain a reasonable standard of living when one is unable to participate in the labor market, is the principal objective of disability benefit programs. Prior research, however, has yet to fully investigate how well programs achieve this goal in the real world. This paper provides historical background on disability benefit programs and describes reforms made to these programs cross-nationally in the post-industrial era. The paper next evaluates how well disability benefit programs decommodify by drawing on data that encompasses nine countries and two disability policy regimes from the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe. It concludes by discussing policy mechanisms to improve the decommodification objective of disability benefit programs, while presenting an agenda for future research.

The study investigates which considerations employers take into account in response to a social policy measure that requires employers to hire persons with disabilities (PwD). It also looks at if and how employers shape their human resource practices dependent of their organisational context. The decision to hire PwD was theoretically positioned in the Contextual Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) Framework. In a qualitative study carried out among 38 Dutch employers who are inclusive, or are having a positive, neutral or negative attitude to employing PwD, three questions were explored: (1) Which strategic issues in response to a social policy measure do employers consider in their decision (not) to hire PwD?; (2) Which conditions have to be met to assess the organisational setting to be suitable to hire PwD?; (3) How do employers hire PwD aligned with their overall HRM system? This article provides evidence that employers respond in a contextual and strategic way to an institutional pressure, and that they assess different levels of fit (environmental, strategic, organization and internal fit) in their considerations to hire PwD. A customised approach is therefore needed in motivating employers to hire PwD which is based on different HRM perspectives.

Governments have responded to the Covid-19 crisis through various measures designed to reduce transmission and protect people judged to be at heightened risk. This paper explores the implications of such measures in the UK for disabled people, with a particular focus on measures designed to reduce and reshape the use of streets and public space. We divide UK measures into two broad categories. First, there are measures designed to reduce the use of streets and public spaces – e.g., rules requiring people to stay at home except in tightly prescribed circumstances and measures providing specific support (including food delivery and priority online shopping) for people designated as clinically extremely ‘vulnerable’. Second, there are measures designed to control the behaviour of people using streets and public space – e.g., rules on physical distancing and the use of face coverings. We explore the disability-related concerns associated with these types of measure. We also highlight the opportunities this crisis presents for embedding accessibility and inclusion more firmly into the fabric of our streets and call for renewed resistance to policies and practices shaped by ableist assumptions and attitudes.