Turning disability into a business: Disabled entrepreneurs’ anomalous bodily capital

Abstract

In a time and place where being impaired is equated to being of lesser economic value, some disabled people take matters into their own hands by creating their own job and converting their bodily difference into bodily capital. This paper uses a Bourdieuan lens to discover what sets apart disabled entrepreneurs who build their business around disability and those who do not. Building on the experiences of 40 entrepreneurs, we outline the existence of certain bodily and mental schemata that lead to a body habituated to run a business centred around one’s impairment and experience of living as a disabled person in an ableist world. We specify such ‘anomalous’ bodily capital and discuss the constraints to its conversion related to the social environment and impairment effects. This study speaks back to the literature on disability in organizational contexts by extending the ‘value in disability’ debate whilst remaining cognizant of the danger of ‘supercrip’ stereotyping and disability ghettoization. In addition, the complex structure/agency interplay inherent to the practice of leveraging anomalous bodily capital offers a contribution to entrepreneurship research that tends to adhere to a simplistic view of the body.