Bringing back the body without the blame?: the experience of ill and disabled people at work

Abstract

Abstract This paper tussles with the policy question, that of integrating people with arthritis into employment, in terras of a dialectic between trouble and trust. It suggests that disability theorists' emphasis on the ‘social model of disability’ as the definitive explanation for disabled people's unfavourable position in the labour market is limited without an understanding of the body as a set of relationships linking self and outer world together. For disabled people, longterm illness in a public domain such as work may profoundly disrupt expectations about biographical and social integrity, and normative order. Using an indepth qualitative approach, this paper focuses on the differing employment experiences of two informants disabled by rheumatoid arthritis. Their accounts illustrate some tensions between the breakdown of trust, its constitution as trouble, and attempts to restore ‘business as usual’ in the workplace. The wider social and cultural significance of illness in the workplace, and the need to adopt a more discriminating approach to ‘discrimination’ are discussed.