From flexibility to accommodation? Disabled people and the reinvention of paid work

Scholarship on 'flexible' work and changing organizational cultures has had little to say about the implications of these developments for disabled people. Drawing on in-depth interviews, this paper examines the ways in which disabled workers struggle over accommodations in contemporary workplaces. Analysis reveals a number of themes concerning training, speed at work, and emotional and aesthetic labour. At their core, these themes concern the ability of workers to exercise control over the labour process. Efforts to obtain accommodation are frustrated by multiple strategies that include people's propensity to self-discipline in the interests of achieving a valued identity through paid work. The paper argues in conclusion that accommodation, as both discourse and practice, offers a conceptual resource for rethinking contemporary employment with implications for both disabled and non-disabled workers.