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Globally, jurisdictions have made several attempts to eliminate and minimize discrimination in employment. These include moral suasion, social justice arguments, business case arguments, and legislative enactments. Whilst the former has had limited success, the passage of legislation has proved instrumental, not only in containing the perpetration of discrimination based on protected grounds but also in increasing awareness of the disadvantages which result from the disparate treatment meted out to persons as a result of their immutable characteristics. Disabilities are one such grounds. Where legislation exists, it typically prohibits disparate treatment in relation to persons with disabilities in the areas of employment, education, and the provision of goods and services. This chapter analyses a sample of discrimination cases, with claimants who have alleged discrimination based on their diagnosis of autism or a related disorder within the autism spectrum. These cases are within the United Kingdom and have been decided by Employment Tribunals in England. The cases and decisions are held at the office of the Employment Tribunal Service in Suffolk and are accessible via their online repository. The sample of Tribunal cases presented here relate to various employment practices within British workplaces.

This article examines the dialectics of wrongful life and wrongful birth claims in Israel from 1986 until 2012. In May 2012 Israeli Supreme Court declared that while wrongful birth claims were still permitted, wrongful life claims were no longer accepted in a court of law. The article examines the conditions that allowed for and supported the expansion of wrongful life/birth claims until 2012. The article identifies two parallel dynamics of expansion: a broadening of the scope of negligent conduct and a view of milder forms of disabilities as damage that merits compensation. The article further suggests four explanations for such doctrinal evolution, two of which emanate from doctrinal ambiguities and the other two are rooted in social factors that have shaped the meaning of disability as a tragedy and state of inferiority. While recent developments seem promising, the article concludes with a word of caution. Such changes may reproduce past injustices mainly because the compensation mechanism has remained an individual-torts based one, which may run counter to the broader struggle for social change for disabled people.

This study aims to investigate Australian claimants’ experience of the total and permanent disability (TPD) insurance claims process and documents their recommendations for improvement.

A qualitative methodology was used. In all, 12 claimants with finalized TPD claims were recruited via their superannuation fund. Data collected from in-depth interviews were thematically analyzed and reported using the COREQ checklist. Extracts from verbatim transcription were included to represent the claimant without bias.

Most interviewees described a flawed claims process in which important information was withheld or unclear, procedures were complicated and arduous, communication was poor and frequent need for “chasing up” was frustrating. The claims process undermined the well-being of many interviewees at a critical time in their adjustment to disability. Lump sum payment yielded unexpected consequences for ten interviewees. Some interviewees retained a desire to work despite serious disability.

The use of purposive sampling means that findings may not represent the experience of all claimants with finalized TPD claims. Saturation of knowledge was reached despite the relatively small number of in-depth interviews conducted. In the absence of previous research, this study identifies areas of concern in the TPD claimant experience and posits a set of important claimant issues for further investigation.

A person-centred approach is needed. Claimants would benefit from introduction of clear process information, a single point-of-contact throughout claim, advocacy/support and rehabilitation.

This inaugural study provides an understanding of challenges faced by TPD claimants. All interviewees provided suggestions for improvement in the TPD claims process.

While there are myriad legal issues confronting school leaders, the focus on the complexities involving special education law and bullying has increased recently. The U.S. Department of Education wrote in a 2014 “Dear Colleague Letter” (Guidance) that its office “has received an ever-increasing number of complaints concerning the bullying of students with disabilities and the effects of that bullying on their education, including on the special education and related services to which they are entitled” (p. 1). The Guidance as well as recent litigation illustrates how plaintiffs have alleged violations under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and/or the Americans with Disabilities Act when students with disabilities are bullied in schools. In this chapter, after discussing the related literature and the legal context, we examine several illustrative recent cases and the 2014 Guidance to highlight the relevant issues for school leaders. We conclude with recommendations and emphasize that school leaders must become knowledgeable about this emerging legal topic. Specifically, with a greater understanding of how they can prevent and respond to the bullying of students with disabilities, school leaders have the power to make great social change within schools.

We propose that institutional actors do not just ceremonially comply with the cultural values in their environment, as institutional theorists have suggested. Instead, we argue that institutional actors can use conflicting cultural values as tools to further their interests and, in doing so, affect significant social problems and cause unanticipated changes in their core goals and policies. To present support for that proposition, we describe an epidemic of work disability that occurred in the Netherlands between 1967 and 1988. The epidemic is examined in light of conflicting Dutch cultural conceptions of the meaning of work and the meaning of economic security in the welfare state. The behavior of key institutional actors, including the government, medical institutions, employers, and labor unions, is examined to identify their roles in the epidemic. We assert that, by pursuing its own interests while upholding Dutch cultural values, each institutional actor produced conditions in which the work disability epidemic could occur.

Important Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)‐related issues that derive from the case law are described and analyzed with the aim of providing guidance both for those responsible for establishing organizational policies, procedures, and practices.

A total of 50 influential court cases spanning the past ten years are reviewed and synthesized to better understand the current and future impact of the ADA.

Better understanding of ADA can help employers both avoid costly litigation and take advantage of a segment of the US labor market that has not yet been fully utilized.

This paper helps practitioner and researchers better understand the organizational implications of the ADA. Better understanding the current case law should lead to employer policies, procedures, and practices that facilitate the better utilization of the qualified disabled work force without compromising employer concerns related to productivity and other job‐related outcomes.

Workers in the United States who lose their job may benefit from temporary assistance programs and may apply for Disability Insurance (DI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI). We measure whether participation in four temporary assistance programs (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Unemployment Insurance (UI), and Temporary Disability Insurance programs (TDI)) influence application for DI, SSI, and re-employment. We instrument temporary assistance participation using variation in policies across states and over time. Results from our instrumental variables models suggest that increased access to UI benefits reduces applications for DI. This result is robust to different sensitivity checks. We also find less robust evidence that UI participation increases the probability of return to work and reduces the probability of claiming SSI benefits. In contrast, some of our results suggest a positive effect of SNAP participation on claiming SSI.

Why should anybody outside the USA care about the attempt to reorganize the Disability Determination Service (DDS) of the Social Security Administration (SSA)? Part of the answer to this question has to do with the assumptions and approaches which were used. In fact, the attempt to reorganize DDS is one of the first well‐documented attempts to re‐engineer a major agency in the public sector. Given the excitement in the private sector about re‐engineering and its potential and possible cost, public managers everywhere should develop a better understanding of what re‐engineering is all about. The use of a case study seems to be a promising way for framing and illustrating some of the important questions about the use of re‐engineering in the public sector.

This chapter examines how personal testimonies at four town hall listening sessions on the ADA Amendments Act (ADAAA) proposed regulations reflect and affect the institutional narrative of “who counts” as disabled, and “what counts” as a reasonable accommodation in the United States.

I use the full transcripts of four town hall meetings to analyze the stories told.

Despite changes to public policy intended to broaden the meaning and scope of “disability,” narrative analysis demonstrates how difficult it is to change the fixed and narrow institutionalized beliefs about who counts as “really disabled” and therefore in “real need” of accommodations.

This study suggests a theoretical framework for conceptualizing disability; highlights the importance of narratives in public policy; and suggests the need for more complex understandings of what constitutes reasonable accommodation of disability in the workplace. The study illustrates the value of a narrative approach to understanding disability policy and policymaking more generally.

The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the work of sociologists who laid the foundation for queer and crip approaches to disability and to address how queer and crip theory has and can help to re-conceptualize our understandings of health, illness, disability, and sexuality.

This paper is an examination of historical moments and prominent literature within medical sociology and sociology of disability. Sociological and popular understandings of disability and sexuality have often mirrored each other historically. Although this literature review focuses primarily on medical sociology and disability studies literature, some works of scholars specializing in gender studies, sexuality, literature, history, and queer studies are also included

In this paper, I argue that the medicalization and pathologization of human differences specifically as it pertains to sexuality and disability within the medical sociological literature have led to constructionist, social model, and feminist critiques. It is these critiques that then laid the foundation for the development of queer and crip theoretical approaches to both disability and sexuality.

Crip and queer approaches to disability provide a clear call for future sociological research. Few social science scholars have applied queer and crip approaches in empirical studies on disability. The majority of work in this area is located in the humanities and concerned with literary criticism. A broader array of empirical work on the intersection of sexuality and disability from queer/crip perspectives is needed both to refine these postmodern theoretical models and to examine their implications for the complex lived experience that lies at the intersection of sexuality and disability. In queering disability and cripping sexuality and gender, we may be able not only to more fully conceptualize disability, sexuality, and gender as individual social categories, but also to more fully understand the complex intersection of these social locations.