Examining Information Systems-Enabled Workplace Inclusion For Disabled Employees

Cao, Shiya

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Examining Information Systems-Enabled Workplace Inclusion For Disabled Employees

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The dominant information systems (IS) paradigm, grounded in functionalism, often forces standardization over flexibility and diversity as well as ignores competing views or needs of technologies and their use in organizations across stakeholders reinforcing pre-existing structural barriers. This dissertation examines these issues in the social inclusion context that particularly needs to uncover various human effects and challenge structural inequality. This work recognizes the need to use a critical lens to identify and address the tension between the functionalist perspective informing IS design and the need of IS design to empower marginalized groups. This research provides an alternate approach to designing IS that emphasizes individual differences and needs, facilitates multiple stakeholder inputs, emancipates marginalized groups, and integrates more holistically in a historical, social, and political environment. This dissertation specifically focuses on utilizing specialized accommodation management systems to integrate disabled employees into the workplace. The three-paper dissertation draws on exploratory research with disabled employees and organizations, combined with historical data and discourse analysis. From an industry level, the first paper focuses on the interpretations, legitimation, and mobilization of the organizing vision of accommodation management systems. From an organizational level, the second paper examines IS legitimation strategies and legitimation monitoring activities over time from a multi-dimensional value generation perspective. From a design science research perspective, the third paper examines collective IS use in the accommodation process and develops the critical disability design theory for transforming nonideal configurations to an ideal type of networked use with team task interdependence, which fits better with the social characteristics of the accommodation process and results in better employees’ accommodation experiences.

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