People with Mental Disabilities in the Employment Process: Strategies, Barriers, and Subjective Meanings of Participation

Full social inclusion, a fundamental cause of well-being, still remains a precarious and unreached goal for people with disabilities. Organisations for the Disabled worldwide, international normative regulations and domestic public policy in most countries consider employment and participation on the labor market one of the most important tracks to the improvement of participation and well-being. Whereas people with physical and sensory impairments have reached broader public recognition of their problematic societal position related to their precarious access to the labor market, people with mental disabilities have been and still remain particularly excluded from society and all spheres of employment.

While since the 1960s in most developed economies processes of deinstitutionalization and restructuring social welfare systems lead to more social inclusion and participation of people with special needs within society, this process included people with mental disorders only much more recently. But people with mental disabilities have become more visible in Russia thanks to the activities of NGOs and parent-activists, and the problems of their independent living and employment have become more pressing for political decision-makers.

Globally and in Russia, the number of people with disabilities employed in various sectors of the economy is growing. In addition to moral and ethical arguments and human rights aspects, also economic calculations support the contribution of social inclusion to economic growth, because studies have shown how companies with an inclusive work environment for people with disabilities can increase their income considerably. However, people with mental disorders are still much less often addressed by labor market inclusion measures and their problems of employment remain most acute and need to be thoroughly investigated.

This project is closing the lack of academic knowledge about the recipient site of inclusive politics and practices. In order to make inclusive policies and practices work effectively, they need to align with and relate to the understandings, interpretations and meanings employment has for the target group. Here, questions of how people with mental disabilities make sense of the inclusive practices and policies offered by state and non-state actors, and what meaning do employment and labor market activities have for their well-being, remain mostly outside the academic attention. Hence, our analytical focus is on the socially, institutionally and politically embedded perception and meaning-making of people with mental disabilities about work and labor market activities, and on the interaction between society and those who are labelled “mentally disabled” in pursuing labor market integration. Successful integration of the mentally disabled into the community is dependent on knowledge about their understanding of workplace possibilities, their motivations regarding labor market activities and their perception of support by NGOs and state agencies.

What is more, mental disability as a social phenomenon is almost exclusively studied in the context of western societies. We change the research perspective to non-western, post-Soviet conditions and contribute to a broadening of the limited, euro-centric perspective on social inclusion of people with (mental) disabilities. Additionally, interviewing with mentally disabled respondents presents a serious challenge for traditional fieldwork formats, interviewing methods and analytical-interpretive practices. Therefore, this project also aims at contributing to the sociological study of disability by reviewing and revising methods of interviewing, e.g. through collaboration with community organizations and techniques of analyzing interview texts.

This project will be carried out on the principles of methodological triangulation and involves desk and field research. During the desk research phase objective conditions and regulatory frameworks that determine the inclusive employment of people with mental disabilities will be analyzed. During field research to define the context, barriers and drivers, on the one hand, and strategies and subjective meanings of employment of mentally disabled people, on the other hand, a series of semi-structured interviews will be conducted with mentally disabled people themselves, their parents and guardians, representatives of the non-profit sector and parent organizations, employers and public sector experts (no less than 45 interviews in total). The study will be carried out on the principle of participatory research, based on the post-traditional model of disability, and by including the non-profit sector, parent communities and people with mental disabilities themselves and their guardians in the discussion of attitudes and dilemmas of inclusive employment.

The proposed research project brings together colleagues, who so far have not yet worked together in this composition, but all having experience in the wider field of studying social inclusion of people with disabilities. The previous experience has made the lack of research on the social inclusion of people with mental disabilities and the related methodological challenges obvious which we aim to address in this project by developing our expertise into this new direction.