Ethical Dilemmas of Disability Inclusion—Emerging Ethics of Activism and Care: Introduction to the Special Issue

Oana Branzei, Anica Zeyen, Susanne M. Bruyère, Eline Jammaers, Nidhil Singal, Gregor Wolbring

Journal of Business Ethics · 2025 · Volume 201 · Issue 4

Abstract

The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that 386 million of the world’s working-age people have some kind of disability (ILO,2024). This is only a fraction of the 1.3 billion people currently identifying as disabled (United Nations Department of Economic & Social Affairs,2024). Disabled people live, learn, self-advocate and are entrepreneurs. By interacting with others who often lack first-person experiences of disability, they influence a wide range of social norms.Employment is a fundamental human right, yet with unemployment among disabled people reaching as high as 80% in some countries or for certain disabilities, disability advocates have long fought against the systemic barriers that deny this right. (Keen & Oulton,2009; Lovegood & Dorado,2025; United Nations Department of Economic & Social Affairs,2024). For instance, taking stock of progress over the five decades since the passage of the US Rehabilitation Act in 1973, (Schur et al.,2024) conclude that people with disabilities still face significant employment disparities with an employment rate of 37.1% in 2023 compared to 75.0% for those without disabilities. Furthermore, they show that disabled people earn 15% less on average, are twice as likely to live in poverty, and often encounter workplace discrimination, lack of support, lower job security, and precarious work conditions. The latest United Nations’ Flagship Report on Disabilities and Development (2024) concludes that disabled people have been left behind and that progress is insufficient and, in some cases, has stagnated or reversed.Aspects of life such as identity, self-representation, and voice often demand significant additional personal investment—of effort, energy, and emotion—from disabled individuals (Branzei & Zeyen,2025a; Zeyen & Branzei,2023). Aspects of life such as identity, self-representation, and voice often demand significant additional personal investment—of effort, energy, and emotion—from disabled individuals (Watermeyer & Swartz,2024). uch discrimination is often discussed under the umbrella ofableism—bias against disabled people rooted in a preference for normative, non-disabled bodies and minds (Campbell,2009; Wolbring,2008); or disableism—the systemic exclusion of disabled people through institutional structures and practices (Goodley,2013; Miller et al.,2004; Wolbring,2008).Against this backdrop, two emerging areas of inquiry—the intersectionality of disabled people (Wolbring & Nasir,2024) and the equity, diversity and inclusion of disabled people (Wolbring & Lillywhite,2021)—are increasingly being examined through the lenses of ableism and disableism, offering new insights into how discrimination operates and how it might be dismantled within management and organization studies.The call for papers for this special issue (Zeyen et al.,2022) was motivated by the enduring discrepancy between the state of the world and the state of the field in management and organization studies. A small handful of early references warned of disability-job fit stereotypes (Colella & Varma,2001) as well as of negative social constructions of disability (Harlan & Robert,1998) and their effects on the treatment of disabled individuals in organizations (Stone & Colella,1996).More recently, and in response to persistent inequities, research on ableism and disableism flourished in several fields of study,Footnote1with dedicated areas in human rights (Gordon et al.,2018), history (Hanes et al.,2017; Rembis et al.,2018), education (Aron & Loprest,2012; Singal & Wijesinghe,2025), and sociology (Lewis Brown et al.,2023). Numerous edited volumes have contrasted the problems of the past and begun exploring alternative futures of working while disabled (Carey,2022; Carling-Jenkins,2016; Rioux et al.,2021). Since our original call for papers for this special issue was published in 2022, there has been an increase in publications on disability within leading management publications (Boehm & Jammaers,2024). Recently, several edited collections (Beatty et al.,2023; Branzei & Zeyen,2025b; Breen & Forwell,2023; Fielden et al.,2020) also focused on the intersection of disability and organizing. Some colleagues even argue in favor of mainstreaming disability (Choudhury Kaul et al.,2022) as a dedicated area of study in fields like entrepreneurship (Yousafzai et al.,2022), or work (Heymann et al.,2014), following precedents in other fields. Despite this increase in academic attention, the implications of ableism and disableism, even on a topics like inclusion, still receive significant less attention by management and organization scholars than other marginalized characteristics.

Keywords

Disability, Ethics of care, Ethics of activism, Ableism, Disableism

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