OCE Workshop | Rachel LE MAROIS | Thursday, March 6th | 12h15-14h15

We will have the great pleasure of welcoming Rachel Le Marois. Rachel is an PhD student at emlyon. She’ll be giving a talk entitled: 

 “Universal design as alternative organizing: A blind spot between disability law and financial wokism”

Despite extensive literature on universal design (UD) in architecture and education, its application to disability management, organization, and human resources remains limited. The core principle of UD is to move beyond individual disability workstation accommodations and instead prioritize workplace accessibility for all employees, regardless of their potential disabilities or other unique characteristics. As a normative framework, UD offers a foundation for rethinking inclusive spatial, environmental, temporal, and cognitive work organizing. This alternative approach already exists in an embryonic form among some of the disability managers (DMs) I met. Based on qualitative interviews, observations, and legal and paralegal archival data collected between 2021 and 2023, I explore how these DMs envision UD, how they are limited in UDs implementation, and how their differences in profiles, compared to other DMs, influence their vision. Revealing the importance of DM’s education and previous professional background, prior to their involvement in DMs role, in improving disability inclusion (in opposition to integration). Second, this article shows how the French conflation of two distinct legal definitions of disability accommodation has shaped disability inclusion at work, steering it primarily toward individual accommodations rather than wider systemic change and how financial incentives and regulatory constraints can shape corporate commitment to any disability inclusion program, whether individual or universal. This article contributes to the literature on UD by integrating insights from alternative organizing literature, introducing a critique of capitalism that is currently absent from UD theories. Additionally, it challenges the French legislative interpretation of the right to reasonable accommodation for disability as a progressive step toward the social model of disability (in opposition to the medical model). Instead, it evidences how the embodiment of the social model may lie in UD rather than individual workstation accommodations, an idea that is under-theorized in management and alternative organizing.

The event takes place in emlyon business school, at Lyon and on Zoom. 

Here is the link to register you, to be completed by Monday 3th:
https://forms.office.com/e/i7cFgn4648