From Shelter to Emancipation: How Disabled Workers Found Their Own Voice Through Identity Work

Abstract

While studies have examined individual and organizational identity work, we focus on the dynamic interplay between the two. Drawing on a six-year longitudinal study of disabled workers in a sheltered workshop in Germany, we show how the disabled found their own voice to be seen as active members of society and changed the organizational exclusionary identity of the workshop. We develop a process model with three different phases of “guided emancipation:” maintenance of identity constraints, external validation, and forging a new disability identity. Our findings advance our understanding of individual and organizational identity work processes in the workplace. First, engagement in purposeful identity work is not just performed by managers and leaders, but also by marginalized actors to empower themselves in an organization in which their role is highly constrained. Second, by illustrating the dynamic interplay between both individual and organizational identity work, we show how changes in individual identity work can precipitate an overall change in organizational identity. Third, we show how disabled workers engaged in identity work to change the socially constructed view of disability imposed on them by sheltered workshops as part of an institutionalized welfare system through expressing a positive disability identity based on their self-concept.