Many in the disability movement argue that there are just two competing models that attempt to explain the causes of disability (Abberley 1987; Barnes 1990; Campbell & Oliver 1996; Finkelstein 2001; Oliver 1990; Swain et al 1993). The first is referred to as a medical model of disability and argues that disability is caused by impairments – physical, sensory or mental - which are located within the individual body. The second is a social model which argues that disability is a social construction caused by social and environmental factors such as people’s attitudes towards disability and the social construction of physical environments which meet the needs of non-disabled people and disregard those of the disabled.
These two models are seen by many to be mutually exclusive and they lead to very different policies and practices in achieving equality for disabled people. The former model focuses on ‘curing’ the individual while the latter requires changes in the social and environmental factors which cause disabled people to experience their impairment as disabling. Generally it is argued that historically the medical model has been hegemonic and that this has led to the exclusion of disabled people from both material and social benefits (Finkelstein 2001). In order to ensure the inclusion of disabled people into society it is argued that the social model should become the dominant understanding of disability. This change in understandings has become the causus belli of the disability movement.
Disability can affect many aspects of an impaired person’s life, and since the 1960s there has been increasing focus on specific issues, particularly that of the problem of independent living (Brisenden 1986; Dejong 1983; Finkelstein 2000; Morris 1993). This research is concerned with one aspect of disability that has a serious impact on the ability to live independently: the employment of people with impairments. As has already been shown, this subject is highly political (Blair 1997, 1998a, 1998b; Brown 2000; DSS 1998; Harman 1997; Giddens 1998; Mandelson & Liddle 1996; New Statesman 2004) with some authors now arguing that the social model of disability should be placed at the centre of employment policy because it offers greater opportunities for disabled people to find paid employment (Barnes 1999; Drake 2000; Hall 1999; Roulstone 2000).
Consequently, the research conducted for this project inevitably has an overtly political dimension at the centre of which are the claims embedded in the social model that concern the ‘real’ causes of disability. Recently, some academics have argued that the adoption of the social constructionist account of disability that underpins the social model is insufficiently sophisticated to explain fully the phenomenon of disability (Shakespeare & Watson 2002), caused principally for many by the neglect in the social model of any sociology of impairment (Abberley 1987; Hughes 1999, 2000, 2002; Hughes & Paterson 1997; Paterson & Hughes 1999).
Others have challenged the validity of the two mutually exclusive models – medical versus social - posited by social model adherents (for example, Lowe, 2001). Whilst more recently, the entire concept that the social model of disability can encapsulate the experiences and discrimination faced by impaired people has been challenged (Shakespeare 2006). However, for the purposes of this research, a social barriers model of disability has been adopted and applied throughout because it can aide the identification of disabling barriers and thus assist assigning causal links to their creation. A brief discussion of why and how this methodology was applied follows in the next section.