When the state managerializes the law: Enforcing and commodifying disability inclusion

Rachel Le Marois () and Lisa Buchter ()
Additional contact information
Rachel Le Marois: EM - EMLyon Business School
Lisa Buchter: EM - EMLyon Business School

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: While disability inclusion is promoted in many countries, policy reforms in France have shifted the conversation about anti-discrimination laws toward financial concerns by increasing financial penalties for non-compliance and developing various accounting techniques to reduce these penalties. In this article, we explore the unintended consequences of focusing on accounting in the design of disability laws, specifically, the commodification of disability inclusion. Through a qualitative study of disability inclusion in France, we show how state actors designed and interpreted the law to appeal to businesses through creating legal loopholes and strong financial incentives and explain how this encouraged the commodification of disability inclusion. We show how this commodification is detrimental to disabled workers and prevents substantive compliance with an existing quota. While scholarship has explored how companies managerialize the law, this article demonstrates how the state is complicit in this process. This article contributes to the literature at the crossroads of law, organizations, and critical accounting by showing some of the drivers and consequences of the commodification of inclusion at work. We demonstrate how translating legal mandates into accounting tools can be a central mechanism of managerialization, leading to the commodification of legal ideals.

Keywords: workplace disability inclusion; state; policy; organization; managerialization; disability manager; dehumanization; commodification; Ableism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03-01
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-05531897v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Organization, 2026, 33 (2), pp.184 - 212. ⟨10.1177/13505084251323867⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-05531897v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05531897

DOI: 10.1177/13505084251323867

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().