# When the State Managerializes the law. Enforcing and Commodifying Disability Inclusion

Rachel Le Marois, Lisa Buchter

► To cite this version:

Rachel Le Marois, Lisa Buchter. When the State Managerializes the law. Enforcing and Commodifying Disability Inclusion. Academy of Management, 85th Annual Meeting, 2025, Jul 2025, Copenhagen, Denmark. Academy of Management Proceedings, 2025, 10.5465/AMPROC.2025.178bp. hal-05126557

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WHEN THE STATE MANAGERIALIZES THE LAW¹
ENFORCING AND COMMODIFYING DISABILITY INCLUSION

RACHEL LE MAROIS
emlyon business school

144 Av. Jean Jaurès, 69007 Lyon, France
Sciences Po Paris

27 Rue Saint-Guillaume, 75007 Paris, France

LISA BUCHTER
emlyon business school

Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings, 2025

[Submitted version April 2025. The full paper will be published in January 2026]

## ABSTRACT

While France has passed laws stating that companies need to have 6% of disabled workers in their workforce, few organizations meet this quota today. Our article seeks to explain this enforcement gap by showing the role of the state in managerializing the law. We show how the state has contributed to shifting attention away from a focus on anti-discrimination, stressing instead financial concerns for companies (penalties for non-compliance, accounting techniques to circumvent this quota). Drawing on a two-year qualitative fieldwork, we trace how this managerialization of the law by state actors led to a commodification of disability inclusion in France.

## INTRODUCTION

You can reduce by half [your financial penalty] even if your company does not employ a single disabled person. To find out how much a subcontracting contract can be valued for your obligation to employ disabled people, you need to apply the following formula:

Price of supplies, work or services excluding tax - Cost of raw materials, products, materials and selling expenses
2000 x Hourly rate of the [current minimum wage]

This quote from a French agency website² is a telling example of how the French state offers ways to circumvent the disability quota it created through different accounting techniques. Here, a quasi-governmental agency explains to French organizations how to use subcontracting to divide in half their financial penalty for not complying with French disability laws, in this case specifically for failing to comply with a quota requiring that companies have 6% of disabled workers in their workforce. Instead of demanding strict enforcement of this quota, the state showcases legal loopholes companies can use to mitigate the financial costs of not abiding by the law. The French states thus partakes in a process of the managerialization of the law—meaning the reinterpretation of legal mandates in line with the interests of corporate managers (Edelman
et al., 2001). While existing research has stressed the role of managers and corporate actors in
this managerialization of the law (Dobbin, 2009; Edelman, 2016; Edelman & Cabrera, 2020), we
show how state actors also participate in this process of legal managerialization.

Drawing on a qualitative study of the implementation of disability laws in France
(interviews, observations, analysis of legal and paralegal documents), we analyze how the state
translated legal mandates into accounting requirements, leading to a progressive
commodification of disability inclusion. This commodification of disability inclusion altered the
experience of disabled workers, as companies minimized their direct recruitment targets, chose
alternative options to avoid financial penalties (e.g., subcontracting indirect recruitment), and
pressured their existing workforce to disclose potential disabilities, while neglecting the welfare,
accommodations, and long-term professional success of disabled workers.

## THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

This article stresses the role of state agents in the process of the managerialization of the law and thus contributes to explaining why existing laws fail to protect workers’ rights and actively stop discrimination. Two bodies of research have previously provided explanations for why workers are not effectively protected by existing regulations. One body of literature has analyzed the role of deregulation to account for why workers’ rights are poorly protected in global markets, as privatization has led to a progressive removal of national protections for workers (Alamgir & Cairns, 2015; Harvey, 2007). While this literature has stressed the role of national states in the decline of workers’ protections, it does not fully explain our case, as new layers of legal protections have gradually been enacted to protect disabled workers in France (Baudot, 2018).

Closer to our case, a second body of literature has highlighted how ambiguous laws were
interpreted by corporate actors to their advantage, leading to the superficial implementation of
legal requirements (Buchter, 2020; Dobbin, 2009; Edelman, 2016). This managerialization of the
law can take many forms, such as promoting diversity rather than anti-discrimination programs,
leading to symbolic compliance to existing laws (Edelman et al., 2001). The best practices
promoted by companies can fall short of protecting workers’ rights, even when they appear to
satisfy diverse stakeholders (Edelman et al., 2011; Kalev et al., 2006; Krieger et al., 2015). Yet
this body of research does not show how state actors can contribute to reinterpreting the law in
line with corporate interests. Our research thus fills this gap, stressing how state agents take part
in managerializing the law through different practices: designing legal loopholes that serve
corporate interests, as well as developing accounting tools and financial incentives that cater to
the interests of managers.

## BACKGROUND AND METHODS

France was an ideal case to explore these questions, as it has passed a series of laws
aimed at increasing the employment of disabled workers throughout the years (Baudot, 2018;
Revillard, 2020). For instance, in 1987, a disability employment quota was introduced, requiring
companies to employ a minimum of 6% of disabled workers. Over time, successive laws have
progressively increased the financial penalties for non-compliance with this quota. However,
these laws also introduced accounting mechanisms that enabled companies to circumvent the
penalties. For instance, one reform created waivers for companies that signed collective
agreements that showed some commitment toward disability inclusion (Maggi-Germain, 2010). Similarly, another reform made it possible for companies to partially outsource disability inclusion through subcontracting the employment of disabled workers to organizations in disability-segregated sectors. Last, legislation has failed to account for the severity of disabilities, leading firms to favor hiring individuals whose impairments are less visible and less disruptive to organizational routines, thereby limiting the need for significant workplace adaptations. In 2018, a new requirement was added: companies with more than 250 employees were obligated to designate a disability manager. Despite these ongoing reforms, the average rate of disabled worker employment has remained relatively stagnant, not exceeding 3.5%, which falls short of the 6% target.³

In our study, we analyzed how this legislative framework has been more effective in promoting indirect forms of compliance through the commodification of disability inclusion rather than fostering the recruitment and inclusion of disabled workers in the mainstream labor market. We employed a qualitative inductive approach, involving semi-structured interviews with disability managers, disabled workers, and key actors in the French disability ecosystem, such as union representatives and representatives from disability state agencies. Additionally, we conducted participant observation at disability manager network meetings and disabled workers' nonprofits, along with a textual analysis of legal and paralegal documents. We collected our data in France from 2021 to 2023. Finally, we used NVivo to develop codes, document emerging concepts in memos, and follow an iterative process throughout the coding, data collection, and analysis stages (Charmaz, 2013).

# FINDINGS

## Designing and enforcing laws to align with corporate interests

In the first section of our article, we demonstrated the role of state actors in managerializing the law in its design and enforcement. To show how managerialization was already present in the design of the law, we first analyzed the language chosen in these disability laws. For instance, the state chose to label financial penalties for non-compliance to the disability quota as “contributions” rather than fines. This label hinted that, by paying these fines, companies were contributing to subsidizing a fund for the employment of disabled workers. This label shed a positive light on non-compliant companies and kept their reputations from being tarnished when they failed to meet their quota. We also analyzed how the language around disability was often dehumanizing. For instance, before 2005, disabled workers who counted toward the quota were labelled as “beneficiary units,” which enabled companies to calculate their employment rates based on fractions of workers (e.g., part-time workers were not counted as full beneficiary units, workers aged 50 and over were assigned a valuation coefficient of 1.5), rather than considering them as full individuals.

Then, we analyzed the incentives offered to corporations to promote compliance to the law and the loopholes the state created to enable companies to avoid direct recruitment of disabled workers. One clear financial incentive was that financial sanctions could temporarily be waived and instead become disability budgets for companies, if those companies adopted collective agreements to promote disability inclusion and set preliminary goals, even if those goals were minimal compared to the 6% quota. Second, the state designed various loopholes that could help companies reduce their financial penalties even if they did not comply with the quota.
For instance, subcontracting to companies hiring a majority of disabled workers could reduce financial penalties by 50%, thus making indirect recruitment and outsourcing financially advantageous options for companies that did not meet their quota. These loopholes became the dominant actions for disability inclusion in French companies, at the expense of more concrete actions such as high recruitment targets, accommodations in the work environment, and efforts to maintain employment for workers whose health status had deteriorated over time.

Last, we demonstrated how state actors managerialized the enforcement of the law by examining the close-knit collaborations between companies and enforcement agents to enforce disability laws. We analyzed how the quasi-governmental agency in charge of disability policy enforcement in France collaborated closely with corporations and how its agents described being trained on the ground by working with corporate actors.

Our findings thus stressed how state actors contributed to the managerialization of the law by designing laws that were in line with the priorities of corporate managers, creating loopholes and financial incentives that catered to the interests of corporate actors, and involving corporate actors in the agency tasked with enforcement.

## State actors reinterpreting the law at the expense of disabled workers

In the second section, our article demonstrated how some state actors contributed to forging a commodified interpretation of disability inclusion. We examined in great detail how these state actors, along with other legal intermediaries, took part in reinterpreting disability laws to mean that companies should identify disabled workers within their workforce and convince them to disclose their disabilities. This practice could artificially inflate a firm's quota of disabled workers but created several drawbacks for disabled workers. First, it put pressure on workers with invisible disabilities to disclose their disability status, something they were legally protected from on paper (Buchter, 2020). Second, this artificial inflation of the quota meant companies didn't need to recruit as many disabled workers to meet their quota. Last, by prioritizing disabled workers who were already employed, companies were able to use reasonable accommodations as a bargaining chip rather than a right they were legally entitled to.

Analyzing our interviews, we showed how several companies prioritized this type of action over more useful disability inclusion practices: recruitment, workplace accommodations, and job maintenance. We also demonstrated how state actors encouraged these practices, which seemed to deviate from the spirit of the law. The complicity of state actors in promoting these kinds of practices reinforced the commodification of disability inclusion, promoting cost dodging with minimal effort at inclusion. By encouraging corporate actors to adopt such an economically pragmatic approach, state actors helped managers reduce their financial penalties at the expense of stronger inclusion of disabled workers.

## Commodification of disability inclusion through outsourcing implementation

In the third section, we showed how the reframing of the law in line with managerial interests favored an outsourcing of disability inclusion practices to a profitable niche market in France, strengthening the commodification of disability inclusion. We argued that this niche market was made possible because state policies allowed companies to waive financial penalties and defer those penalties to use as disability budgets in some circumstances. Most interviewees in the corporate world stressed how they collaborated with external stakeholders to implement
their disability policies. Their subcontractors contributed to fashioning their interpretations of
disability law and provided companies with tools to exploit the loopholes in these laws to their
advantage. Most of the subcontractors in the domain of disability inclusion in France emphasized
how they could help companies save money and resources. These subcontractors favored indirect
recruitment, helped companies with the complex accounting necessitated by new laws, and often
reinforced workplace segregation rather than inclusion because they offered companies the
option to outsource their disability commitments. We also demonstrated how the subcontractors
in this niche market had a vested interest in companies not meeting their disability quota because
their businesses relied on supporting companies as they moved progressively toward this goal.

CONCLUSION

To conclude, in our article we showed the involvement of state actors in the
managerialization of disability laws in France at different levels. We showed how state actors
took part in this legal managerialization of the law because they were involved in the law's
design, enforcement, interpretation in collaboration with corporate actors, and implementation,
which favored the development of subcontractors paid by corporate disability budgets (created
with the financial penalties the state allowed companies to keep as internal budgets to incentivize
them to take action on disability inclusion). This managerialization of disability law seems to
have led to a commodification of disability inclusion in France. Many actors discussed disability
inclusion through the lens of “saving money,” and this managerialization allowed for indirect
recruitment, delayed implementation, and the outsourcing of disability inclusion. This occurred
at the expense of disabled workers, whose professional inclusion would be better supported by
direct recruitment, workplace accommodations, and the support necessary to remain in
companies throughout their careers.

ENDNOTES

1. The complete article (with the same title) from which this summary is derived has been accepted for publication in the journal *Organization* and will be part of the forthcoming special issue “*Workers that matter and work that counts: Organizing and accounting for value(s)*.” We would like to thank Patrizia Zanoni, Melissa Tyler, Daniela Pianezzi, Junaid Ashraf, Leanne Cutcher, and Shahzad Uddin for their work as editors and guest editors on this special issue. We would also like to thank warmly our anonymous reviewers, who helped us strengthen this manuscript throughout a very constructive process of revision.

2. The quotation here is an excerpt from an article published on the [website](#) of the quasi-state agency AGEFIPH (created by the French Ministry of Employment—law no. 87-517 of July 10, 1987—to support companies and disabled workers through services and financial aid) in February 2019.

3. These figures are taken from the 2022 annual surveys of the [French ministerial statistical service (DARES)](#).

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