ABSTRACT
The social model approach, which has been at the heart of both disabled people’s activism and that of disability studies, recognises that disabling barriers are experienced across many different aspects of a person’s life and opportunities. Yet to a large extent, in the context of contemporary capitalism, ‘Disability itself has come to mean “unable to work”’ (Finkelstein 1991: 8) and Oliver argues that ‘exclusion from the world of work is the most important factor in what happens to us and the way we are treated by society’ (1999: 7). There are debates about why this exclusion occurs, with some arguing that it stems from the very nature of the economic system which dominates the global economy (see, for example, Oliver 1999; Russell and Malhotra 2002 Gleeson 1997) and others arguing that it has more to do with a culture which views disabled people as ‘the other’ (e.g. Armer 2004). However, what both these approaches agree on is that exclusion from the labour market is a central source of discrimination and oppression; it has a fundamental role to play in the concept of citizenship (Abberley 1999); and is key to maintaining the link between disability and poverty (Roulstone 2012).
