Asperger syndrome and employment

My research in a short career so far has concentrated on workplace misbehaviour and employee uses for Web 2.0 communication technology.

More recently, however, I have also been working on a quite different area - adults who have Asperger syndrome and the many problems they have seeking and holding down jobs.

It's a very new area for employment researchers and I've only mentioned it once on my blog before.

The outcome is working paper I intend to present to a sociology conference next week.

My paper is entitled: A labour process analysis of the exclusion of adults with Asperger syndrome from the workplace.

It's really an attempt to look at what sociologists can contribute to helping with the problem.

A paper can be viewed here (please contact me with any comments).

The abstract is as follows:

By comparison with the general employment experiences of adults with a recognised disability, adults with Asperger syndrome – a ‘social’ disability – have been found to have extreme problems when seeking and holding down long-term employment opportunities.

The eclectic literature that explores this emergent problem suggests the widespread exclusion of individuals with Asperger syndrome from the workplace is a multi-dimensional and highly complex problem, and the ‘problem’ is unlikely to be resolved without input from many professional fields of practice.

However, a key dimension to the problem is that until now problems of exclusion have been examined without drawing on a mass of social science literature based on the critical examination of work organisations.

As such, this paper investigates the problem from a labour process perspective – that is, how a labour process based on prioritising profits and targets is likely to conflict with attempts to make necessary and ongoing adjustments for such individuals.

The main approach and method used in the paper involves analysis of secondary qualitative data.

Particular attention is given to the role that socially organised resistance to organisational control, associated with informal groups rather than trade unions, plays in the exclusion of individuals with Asperger syndrome from the workplace.

The key findings suggest the benefits of specialist intervention practices, usually provided by external consultants, is quickly neutralised where employers knowingly or unknowingly marginalise or undermine day-to-day socially organised attempts to support such employees.

Recommendations are made on the character and direction by which future research in this area should progress.